Montale, Debussy, and Modernism [Course Book ed.] 9781400860449

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Montale, Debussy, and Modernism

Princeton Essays on the Arts

For a complete list of books in this series, see page 159.

Montale, Debussy, and Modernism

Gian-Paolo Biasin

Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

Copyright © 1989 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Biasin, Gian-Paolo. Montale, Debussy, and modernism. (Princeton essays on the arts) Translation of: Il vento di Debussy. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Montale, Eugenio, 1896—1981—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Debussy, Claude, 1862-1918— Influence. 3. Ut pictura poesis (Aesthetics) 4. Europe—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. PQ4829.0565Z568613 ig8g 851'.12 89-10516 ISBN 0-691-06790-2 ISBN 0-691-01466-3 (pbk.) This book has been composed in Linotron Baskerville Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Paperbacks, although satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually suitable for library rebinding Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

Contents List of Illustrations Preface

vii ix

1

Debussy and the Wind

2

Ut Figura Poesis

36

3

Strategies of the Antihero

6g

Epilogue

Notes Index

T h e Plainclothes Clown

3

108

118 151

V

Illustrations 1. Space in "In limine." 2. Syntax of "Corno inglese." 3. Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Sugar Bowl, a Lemon and Bread, 1921 or 1922. This and the following Morandi etchings are taken from Lamberto Vitali, L'opera grafica di Giorgio Morandi (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), by kind permission of the author. 4. Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Bread Basket, 1921. 5. Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Drapery on the Left, 1927* 6. Giorgio Morandi, Large, Dark Still Life, 1934. 7. Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Five Objects, 1956. 8. Giorgio Morandi, Various Objects on a Table, 1931. 9. Giorgio Morandi, Still Life in an Oval, circa 1942. 10. Giorgio Morandi, The Bridge on the Savena River at Bologna, 1912. 11. Giorgio Morandi, The White Road, 1933. 12. Giorgio Morandi, II Poggio in the Evening, 1927. 13. Giorgio Morandi, II Poggio in the Morning, 1928. 14. Giorgio Morandi, The Garden at Fondazza Street, 1924-

27 32

49 50 5° 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

vii

Preface Eugenio Montale's poetry is such that it causes not only long-lasting fidelities but also broad resonances, reverberations, and comparisons which expand it and involve it in the European culture of the twentieth century in a subtle, often elusive, yet pervasive manner. In this book I want to explore some of these resonances, part of these reverberations, two such comparisons. I want to keep Montale's poetry at the center of my discourse and at the same time go around it by little-known paths which may be winding, rich with ramifications, intersections, and invitations. In my itinerary I discuss the possible homologies between poetry and music, not in the well-known area of the relationship between libretto and score in opera, but in the more particular one of the formal and thematic choices which marked a modern turning point in both music and poetry. In this area, although I am not a musicologist, I try to show the importance of Claude Debussy not only, as is obvious, for the musical innovations of our century (all the way to Arnold Schonberg and dodecaphony), but for poetry as well, and for the young Montale in particular. In Debussy the wind is a theme, a musical image, a literary topos which, while hearkening back to romanticism, opens u p unexpected passages in our understanding of twentieth-century poetry; it is an invaluable and indispensable IX

χ I Preface prelude, with its sweeping presence over a land or a sea­ scape, to the appearance on the scene of the modern artist, usually presented as an antihero (or clown, or mounte­ bank). T h e young Montale was fascinated by modern art in all of its forms: Debussy and music, as well as the im­ pressionist and postimpressionist painters, the English verse-narrators, and the great fiction writers of our cen­ tury, in primis, Italo Svevo. In my second itinerary I search for the possible homol­ ogies between poetry and painting in a specific area which does not include influences on or preferences by the young Montale, but is concerned with objective (that is, formal, thematic, and ideological) comparisons between his early poems and the work of the great Italian painter and engraver, Giorgio Morandi, whom he did not even know at that time. I also try to reinterpret the Horatian topos of "ut pictura poesis" in light of contemporary criti­ cal theories but with accurate attention to the formal val­ ues of the pictorial and poetic texts I examine. Even in this case I must face a field which is not mine, art criticism; I have entered it with great respect, and I derive from it the joy of a greater understanding not only of painting, but of literature as well. I return to literature alone in the last itinerary, by ex­ ploring the difficult relationship between (lyric) poetry and (novelistic) prose in the twentieth century. While ac­ knowledging—as Cesare Segre did recently—that the two genres are intrinsically different, I have tried to under­ score their homologies, which do exist and are made even more important, in my view, by what Mikhail Bakhtin called "the novelization of literature." In this context, the presence of the antihero (clown, Schlemihl) in the novels of Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello as well as in Montale's poetry becomes a fundamental interpretive key of modern art. T h e epilogue is intended to pull together the threads of the interdisciplinary discourse developed in the three es-

Preface | xi says of the volume; it is intended to be the final intersection where the paths I follow converge—at least temporarily, because an intersection is always open to further roads. Both the interdisciplinary approach and the emphasis on the theme of the clown suggest the critical proposal at the core of the entire work: the (belated) acknowledgment of modernism as a fundamental component of Italian culture. This acknowledgment, it seems to me, is indispensable in order to align at last twentieth-century Italian culture with its Anglo-Saxon and French counterparts. The latter two have been even too hegemonic so far, while the former actually deserves to be recognized in its best voices and achievements. T h e complexity of the subject matter made me provide the text with an apparatus of both broad and specific footnotes which account for the sources I used and suggest further probes into single problems. In this context, I have also given brief bio-bibliographical sketches of a few critics important in Italy but not necessarily familiar to the American reader (for example, Vittorio Pica, Roberto Longhi, Francesco Arcangeli, or Ezio Raimondi). T h e essays that make up this book originally appeared in different and even preliminary versions in various publications: the first in La Regione Liguria 10 (1982), n. 12, in Rassegna di Studi Italiani 1 (1983), n. 2, and in La poesia di Eugenio Montale: Atti del convegno internazionale, Geneva, Novembre 1()82, ed. Sergio CampaiUa and Cesare Federico Goffis (Florence: Le Monnier, 1984); the second in Intersezioni 2 (1982), n. 1; and part of the third in Italian Literature: Roots and Branches, ed. Giose Rimanelli and K. J. Atchity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). My thanks to the respective editors and publishers. These essays were collected and molded into the Italian edition of this book, Il vento di Debussy: La poesia di Montale nella cultura del Novecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985). In my translation I have followed the Italian text closely, only adding a few clarifications where I thought they were

xii I Preface

needed, according to the valuable suggestions of a reader. I provide the texts of Montale's poems first in the original, immediately followed by my literal rendering in English, which seems preferable to more elegant translations already available in print, because my textual analyses are necessarily based on the Italian, especially at the phonic level. Permission to quote the Italian texts of Montale's poetry (© Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1948-77) as well as my own translations is kindly granted by New Directions Publishing Corporation, © 1965-80 for Selected Poems, New Poems, and It Depends: A Poet's Notebook. I wish to thank my students of the seminars in which I discussed and commented on Montale, my friends who read the manuscript, the readers of Princeton University Press, and Julie Marvin, the manuscript editor, for their valuable comments and suggestions. I dedicate this book to E. R., who on the paths of Tilden Park pointed out to me those other paths, of culture and friendship. I also wish to dedicate the present edition to Glauco Cambon, in memoriam: his "inclusive flame," his passion for poetry (and notably Montale's) still shines for me and for all the other readers of modern art.

Montale, Debussy, and Modernism

1

Debussy and the Wind j'aime a Ia fureur les choses OU Ie son se mCie a la Iumiere. CHARLES BAUDELAIRE,

Les bijoux

Poetry and Music Eugenio Montale makes a decisive assertion in the "Imaginary Interview" of 1946, from which it is appropriate to begin: When I started writing the first poems of Ossi di seppia [Cuttlefish bones] I certainly had an idea of the new music and the new painting. I had heard Debussy's "Minstrels," and in the first edition of my book there was a little thing that tried to remake it, "Musica sognata" [Dreamed music]. And I had looked at Gl'impressionisti by the too defamed Vittorio Pica. 1 Even in its typically Montalean caution ("I had an idea," "I had looked at"), this a posteriori assertion of an intention and an awareness fundamental to the beginning of an entire poetic oeuvre maintains a basic importance, an importance enhanced by the recent reappearance in the critical edition of precisely that "little thing" mentioned here. In fact, the statement is a proud vindication of cultural openness and novelty ("the new music, the new painting"-the 3

4 I Chapter One

repetition of the adjective is not casual, but rhetorically revealing). Montale's words are to be taken as a valuable piece of information and not as a misleading indication for the critic tracking the origins of Montale's poetry and the cultural framework in which it belonged and succeeded. To start with, there appear in the opening quotation Montale's three basic lifelong interests: poetry, music, and painting. It is not really necessary to recall the elements, the occasions, the biographical anecdotes in which these interests were articulated and variously expressed—from his pastels with delightful seascapes and smiling portraits to his studies to become a professional baritone, studies which Montale soon abandoned but never forgot, and transferred later to his punctilious activity as a demanding and even idiosyncratic music critic for the leading Milanese daily Il cornere della sera.'2 Rather, the interaction among poetry, music, and painting points out for the contemporary critic the complexity of culture, as it is theorized specifically in Bakhtin's dialogic principle, a complexity Montale had understood and noted clearly on his own, with great effectiveness.3 In fact, the interaction among different genres, expressive modes, languages, and codes by itself is not sufficient: it must be an active and innovative interaction, which should experiment with new possibilities and seek new horizons, by translating the results in one field into another and by transferring one language into another. And that is exactly what Montale did. It is first necessary to ask why Montale points out the new music, particularly Debussy, and the new painting, particularly the impressionists. Certainly, these expressive forms have been congenial to poetry in a centuries-old tradition, from "ut pictura poesis" all the way to "de la musique avant toute chose." They are especially congenial to the young Montale, given the biographical data just mentioned. 4 But why the impressionists, and why Debussy? Briefly we can say, echoing Felix Feneon, that the im-

Debussy and the Wind | 5 pressionists were among the first to lay the foundations of modern painting, through the separation and matching of pure colors on the surface of the painting. The viewer had to mix and fuse these colors together by active perception, thus recreating that visual harmony—and hence the object itself of the painter's vision—which might have seemed lost at first impression: one thinks of Monet's Rouen Cathedral, St. Lazare Station, and haystacks, or of Seurat's Grande Jatte, with their elaborate variations of light and the "infinite delicacy of the modelling."5 It is therefore style, with its disjunction between sign and meaning, which the impressionists emphasize at the expense of representation and objectivity; and it is the active participation of the viewer's eye they require as an integral part of the artistic process—perhaps because, as Walter Benjamin has suggested, the experience of the urban crowd was a new spectacle to which the eye had to become accustomed, thus acquiring a new capacity for vision, of which the impressionist technique would be but a reflection.6 Analogously, Debussy was among the very first to unhinge the traditional tonal system, with deliberate dissonances which broke the harmonic scale and had to be received and accepted by the ears of the listener, who was thereby oriented toward the intrinsic and autonomous musicality of the single sounds. In the new poetry, lexical dissonance and analogic words are the two critical categories that, after Friedrich, vigorously characterize the modern developments and their relationships with music and painting. I do not know whether Montale had such relationships and analogies clearly in mind from the beginning, with all their complexity and ramifications. Probably he did not. But he had certainly understood the importance of the book by Pica, the Neapolitan art critic who had indeed been "too defamed," if one remembers that Ardengo Soffici called him "an imbecile," while Feneon, in contrast, had stressed his "rare coherence" and mental openness without

6 I Chapter One biases or dogmatism. 7 To be sure, Gl'impressionisti presents a remarkable overview of the impressionist movement, from its English precursors to the late followers of Italian divisionism (Giovanni Segantini, Angelo Morbelli, Gaetano Previati, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, and others); above all, Pica's book contains an idea derived from Feneon and still fundamental today for the understanding of the impressionists, that is, "their use of spots of pure colors which become fused at a distance on the pupil of the beholder" rather than on the palette of the painter. 8 But the very fact that Montale cites the impressionists and Debussy together seems to indicate that he considered pictorial and musical impressionism on the same plane, while as far as Debussy is concerned, such a label, even if current then, has been critically reviewed and is no longer considered valid today. It is important to note, as Laura Barile did, that "attention to what was happening in the musical world is characteristic of the culture" of the early twentieth century: for example, "also [Renato] Serra was exploring the same area of the musicality of verse, a musicality intended in quantitative terms, arsis and thesis, rhythm and no longer melody." In such a context it seems useful to recall La dissonanza, the musical journal edited by Giannotto Bastianelli and Ildebrando Pizzetti, with its emblematically programmatic title pointing to the new musics In any case, whether or not Montale was aware of all the implications of the relationship among the expressive novelties in the three arts is not really important. What matters, and it matters greatly, is that he lived this relationship from the very beginning with extraordinary sensitivity and timeliness; that all his early poetry was enriched by this relationship or interaction; and in particular (leaving painting aside for the moment), that he never disavowed his original preference for Debussy, but repeatedly and skillfully used it for his aims of poetic and cultural politics, in ways and contexts that are worth exploring.

Debussy and the Wind | 7 Montale's discourse on Debussy is fragmentary, seemingly occasional and discontinuous, but actually intimately coherent and rigorous when its pieces are put together. Montale's remarks are theoretical, historical, and cultural. At the theoretical level, the relationship of music and poetry is acknowledged by Montale throughout musical aesthetics, from madrigals to opera librettos. The vexed question of the superiority of one over the other is solved in the sense that "poetry and music progress each on its own, and their encounter remains dependent on occasional chances" (as in the cases of Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Schonberg), because, says Montale, following Mallarme, "poetry is itself already music." He repeated this idea in 1962: "I know that the art of the word is itself music, even if it has little to do with the laws of acoustics."10 It might be objected that such a proud assertion of the poetic word's self-sufficiency is contradicted by the initial statement implied in the effort of remaking "Minstrels": it is true, but only on the surface, because precisely by remaking Debussy Montale reasserts the superiority of the word over music, whose "asemantic" character, "a great acquisition of modern culture," 11 is thus thematized, conceptualized, by the only form of art capable of carrying out such an operation explicitly, that is, the written word, and in particular the poetic word. This is so true that in the same imaginary interview Montale mentions the great contemporary "isms" prevalent in European philosophy: "Marforio's big words": Lev Scestov's Kierkegaardian existentialism, Giovanni Gentile's absolute immanentism, Benedetto Croce's "idealistic positivism," and above all, for the years of Ossi di seppia, Etienne Boutroux's contingentism. He does so in order to deny all of them immediately afterwards—but the mentioning itself, which is "semantic," remains: No, in writing my first book (a book that got written by itself) I did not rely on such ideas. . . . I obeyed a need

8 I Chapter One

of musical expression. I wanted my word to be more adherent than those of other poets I had known. More adherent to what? It seemed to me I was living under a glass bell, yet I felt I was close to something essential. A thin veil, just a thread separated me from the definitive quid. The absolute experience would have been the tearing of that veil, of that thread: an explosion, the end of the deceit of the world as representation. But this was an unreachable limit. And my will to adhere remained musical, instinctive, not programmatic. I wanted to twist the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language, even at the cost of a countereloquence. 12 No "isms," then. But in light of poetry's autonomy and of its semantic character, this need for a musical expression says quite a lot about Montale's faith in the written word, from the very beginning. Perhaps it might be appropriate to try to point out possible functional and structural homologies between music and poetry, as Leonard Bernstein has done recently in Chomskyan terms, with impassionate remarks in which the transformations of generative grammar (at the phonologic, symbolic, and semantic level) are convincingly applied to the "reading" of great texts of Western music's But Montale's skepticism on the point remains, and the literary critic must acknowledge it and recognize first the fact that the poet's major efforts to link poetry and music in some way belong entirely to his very early period, and include only a few poems never collected in a volume, that is, never elevated to the dignity of the oeuvre in verse: "Musica silenziosa" (Silent music), "Suonatina di pianoforte" (Piano sonatina), "Accordi" (Accords), and the first section of Ossi, titled "Movimenti," musical movements a la Debussy ("Mouvements" is one of the Images for piano). The movements are, however, already metaphoric: "Ascoltami, i poeti laureati I si muovono . . ." (Listen to me, the poets laureate I move . . .). In the defini-

Debussy and the Wind | 9 tive edition, they include "I limoni" (The lemon trees), "Corno inglese" (English horn), "Falsetto," and "Min­ strels," while the suite "Mediterraneo" (Mediterranean Sea) indeed owes to Debussy's La mer, as Marzio Pieri noted, but I would say more as an idea than as a perform­ ance. 1 4 In subsequent developments of Montale's poetry there will be only echoes or calculated musical references with­ out any systematic intention, as, to give just two examples, in the motet "Infuria sale ο grandine" (Salt or hail rages), which hearkens back to Debussy's "La cathedrale engloutie" ("very likely"^), or in "La bufera" (The storm) with its memory of "Jardins sous la pluie," again by Debussy. Meanwhile, however, at the historical level, Montale knows well that music, painting, and poetry follow their parallel paths, which may or may not coincide in time and correspond in space. Let us consider along with him "some dates" concerning decadentism: T h e pre-Raphaelites were active in England when in Italy the like of [Antonio] Fontanesi and [Michele] Cammarano were painting, who were classical not­ withstanding their romanticism. Rimbaud and MaIlarme write at a time when in Italy the "scapigliati" group is barely born; our "macchiaioli" painters wake up when they encounter French impressionism; De­ bussy is a contemporary of Puccini and Mascagni. D'Annunzio cannot be explained without his foreign sources, which are innumerable. While in Vienna ex­ pressionism rages, in Italy [Alfredo] Casella and com­ pany propound a return to the eighteenth century. 1 6 Let us agree that "luckily in Italy we are late," as Montale asserts in concluding his survey with a smiling but salutary historiographic irony. However, in doing so Montale has dotted his i's and given us the basic data to understand his cultural operation, in which Debussy—a true litmus pa-

10 I Chapter One

per—plays a central function. Let us follow Montale's discourse in the literary field: [Guido Gozzano] reduced D'Annunzio just as Debussy had scaled down Wagner, but without ever achieving results that could be termed Debussyan. Gozzano's poetry remains in that climate that scholars of the late nineteenth-century Italian melodrama called "verista"—a climate which ultimately is not of decadent origin. . . . It seems certain to me that in Gozzano the romantic-bourgeois "verista" element was the most fruitful one. Gozzano reduced the Italian poetry of his time to a lowest common denominator, and here the comparison with Puccini is again irresistible.' 7 Actually, against the reductive arguments of some contemporary detractors, "try to erase Puccini and Gozzano from the framework of their time and tell me if an unfillable void would not be created." 18 But, once the historical judgment and the value judgment are established, we should note the impeccable exactness of Montale's reasoning, in which the musical references are in a dialogic relationship with the literary data. In such a context, we know that Puccini was, polemically for Montale, "late" in comparison with Debussy, and that if we use a qualitative criterion Gozzano cannot be considered a wholly successful innovator ("without ever achieving results that could be termed Debussyan").^ And if Montale gives Gozzano his due ("he was the first who made sparks by making the aulic clash with the prosaic"), nevertheless Montale also reminds us of his own Verlainean intention "to twist the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language, even at the risk of a counter-eloquence." Therefore, although Debussy is at the center of the argument, the true target is actually D'Annunzio. Just as in modern music Debussy reduced and hence in a sense replaced Wagner, so in Italian literature D'Annunzio would be reduced and superseded not by Gozzano, but by Montale—the same Montale who "passed

Debussy and the Wind | 11 through" D'Annunzio. After all, music was added to D'Annunzio (in Le martyre de Saint Sebastien) by Debussy, who in turn was "set to poetry" precisely by Montale! 20

2. Claude Debussy It is appropriate to devote some further attention to Debussy, and try to understand better (or more explicitly, in a more detailed manner) than Montale did the novelty and the importance of his work both in the development of contemporary music and in its relation to literature. We have to consider a cultural context of which music is part as a signifying system "where particular relationships occur between signifier and signified, and in its own way this system symbolizes the great themes of culture: the relationships with the Other, with nature, with death, with desire." 21 In musical historiography, Debussy holds a very singular position. The Italian musicologist Guido Salvetti characterizes him as a "participant in the intellectual and moral engagement of the Wagnerian-decadent composers, inclined toward a 'light' art, made of innuendoes and analogies; an indefatigable searcher (who renewed himself till his death) for a musical language that should express both the spiritual evanescence of inner experiences and the formal rigor of a conscious and perfectly responsible artistic operation." 82 I have chosen these words by Salvetti because they seem to me very effective in outlining the historical-substantial and critical-formal elements of Debussy's work. Another Italian musicologist, Mario Bortolotto, echoes these words when he states that Debussy's aversion "to any form of naturalisme . .. pushed him inexorably toward imprecision, vagueness, even the mystery construed by questionable writers" with symbolist tastes; Debussy had some inclinations toward "yet undetermined pulsions," which, however, had to find "their configuration, and actually their

12 I Chapter One

identity, in the rigor of form." 23 For his part, Pierre Boulez insists that Debussy remains isolated in the musical history of the West, because with him "the unstable, the instant burst into music," and above all "a relative and irreversible conception of musical time, and more generally of the universe of music" was born: "In the organization of sounds, this conception is translated above all into a refusal of the existing harmonic hierarchies as the sole data of the world of sounds." 2 ^ Even more generally, this conception opens the doors to modern music, which, like the novel according to Bakhtin, is characterized by heteroglossia, or linguistic plurality, in that no musical language has succeeded in assuming a dominant position.2S But in the meantime it is worth quoting a statement made by Debussy to his teacher, Ernest Guiraud, back in 1889: "I am not tempted to imitate what I admire in Wagner. I conceive a different dramatic form: music begins where the word is impotent to express: music is written for the inexpressible. I would like that music seemed to emerge from the shade, and after a few instants re-entered it. . . . I dream of poems that do not condemn me to drag long, heavy acts, . . . poems where the characters do not discuss but suffer life and destiny." Bortolotto comments that "it is an impeccable assertion, for its clarity and intensity, of an anxiety to represent" which "already goes beyond the pillars of symbolism."26 In any case, such intentions of the early Debussy are carried out in his major works, from Prelude a Vapres-midi d'unfaune (1894) to Nocturnes (1900) and PelUas et Melisande (1902). These works make u p what was called, because of not entirely justified analogies, Debussy's musical "impressionism." He was not actually an impressionist, "although he provided some pretexts for such a limitation: the misunderstanding derives from the titles [of some compositions], and from the fact that his character, Monsieur Croche, 'spoke of an orchestral score as if it were a painting': a simple question of an antidilettante." 2 '

Debussy and the Wind | 13 Actually, in his revolutionary novelty, Debussy tended toward "the dissolution of the solidity, the grandiosity, the compactness of the musical language of the late German romanticism." 28 Wagner had exacerbated the tension in the traditional harmonic system whereby each accord tends toward another.^ In contrast, Debussy wanted to "break up this tension, which is often artificial, and regain the sound value of each single accord taken by itself," in various ways: by putting "dissonant accords next to one another," by passing "from a consonant accord to another belonging to a different tonality," and through "the lesser force of appeal of the 'point of repose,' that is, of the tonal center" (for example, through the pentatonic scale or defective scales); the consequent "slackening of the harmonic tension" produces ever purer sounds. 30 Debussy carried out an analogous operation on the traditional rhythmic setup, through long pauses, suspensions, repetitions, and variations; coherently in his orchestration he dissolved the orchestral mass of the German symphonic system and preferred pure timbres and soloist instruments, "above all flute, oboe, and English horn." 31 As a further commentary I shall quote a passage from the analysis of Prelude a Vapres-midi d'un faune in which Bernstein emphasizes that the Prelude is "a masterpiece of structure, . . . carefully composed, intentionally designed" on the tritone, "the absolute negation of tonality"—not only that, but the harmonic implications of the tritone ("the whole-tone scale, a unique invention of Debussy's") produce "the first organized atonal material ever to appear in musical history." Bernstein's conclusion is lapidary; the Prelude "is actually an essay on E major."32 In both his orchestral and—especially—piano works after 1902, Debussy emphasizes "the new rigor linking harmony and melody," and, "instead of concealing the melodic and rhythmic line in an impressionistic halo, evidences it neatly" (back in 1910-11, Jacques Riviere had remarked that Debussy's was "a music of delight," but also

14 J Chapter One

"exact, rigorous, rarefied by intelligence," and "touching because of its very rigor"). 33 The innovation of sound thought is achieved through the irony of pieces like "Golliwogg's Cakewalk" or "The Little Shepherd," is remarkable in Images of 1905-1907 and in the twenty-four piano Preludes of 1910-1913, and is definitive in the last works, particularly in the twelve piano Etudes of 1915, where, "following the stimulation of mechanical-technical developments, there occurs a total emancipation of dissonance, and the topoi of twentiethcentury piano music are explored." 34 Summing up, it is possible to agree with Jarocinski, who states that Debussy's aesthetics corresponds fundamentally to Mallarme's poetics: "Both of them are poles apart from Wagner; they searched for 'the essence of things,' the bare truths, not deformed by fiat spatial categories or by a pompous rhetoric." 35 In fact, Boulez's lapidary judgment should be quoted here: "We cannot forget that the time of Debussy is also the time of Cezanne and Mallarme: a triple conjunction which is, perhaps, at the root of every modernity." 36 I hope that the brief preceding remarks, besides defining Debussy's place in the music of his time, clearly indicate his importance in the dialogic relations with literature. Here I take a completely opposite approach from Arthur Wenk's analysis, which shows the influence of some poets (especially Banville, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Louys, and Mallarme) on Debussy's musical choices and solutions. On the contrary, I wish to characterize the influence of Debussy's music on Montale's early poems, following the indication of the poet. Debussy's influence is first of all, and not too paradoxically, a literary one, because for Montale "Debussy, as a musician, was a great homme de lettres, a very open mind that could have expressed itself even outside music, and this is a measure of his importance." 37 Hence we can say that the very literate musician filtered and handed down

Debussy and the Wind | 15 the great lesson of French symbolism to which Montale hearkens back (like Giuseppe Ungaretti, but in a different manner), with great awareness of his own debts as well as of his own autonomy.s 8 This is so true that Montale poses "the Browning-Baudelaire junction" (not Mallarme) at the origins of "all modern poetry."39 He also states that, "starting from Baudelaire and part of Browning, and sometimes from their confluence," a current of poetry was developed, "not realistic, not romantic and not even strictly decadent, which grosso modo can be termed metaphysical. I was born in that wake." To make things absolutely clear, Montale finally adds, "Be it understood that I do not care much about the label 'metaphysical,' because the area of this type of poetry is extremely uncertain. All the art that does not give up reason, but is born of the clash of reason with something that is not reason, might be called metaphysical."*0 A second influence of Debussy is to be emphasized in the antigrandiosity of Montale's style and in the antiheroism of his characters who do not discuss but suffer: certainly they are cultural models to be found not only in Maurice Maeterlink's theatre but in so much literature of the twentieth century. This influence can be documented, as far as Montale is concerned, in his poetics of diminutio antiaulica in "I limoni," and in his antihero par excellence, Arsenio, who is foreshadowed by "Minstrels," among other poems. We should also stress Debussy's "emancipation of dissonance," which was later taken up and theorized by Igor Stravinsky in his Poetique musicale of 1942, significantly quoted at the beginning of Friedrich's book in order to characterize modern poetry and its structure. 41 Through lexical dissonance, modern poets want to express an even deeper, inner dissonance, and there is no doubt that Montale is an absolutely central and genuine voice in this kind of lyric and modern poetry. Also, a precise although not lasting influence by Debussy can be noticed in the early poems by Montale: three out of the seven "Ac-

16 I Chapter One cordi" bear the names of three of Debussy's favorite instruments in orchestration: flute, oboe, and English horn (and it should be noted that another poem of the same period, "Suonatina di pianoforte," perhaps precisely because it is written "alia Maurizio Ravel" and not a la Claude Debussy, remains in the limbo of uncollected works).42 Finally, not so much an influence as a consonance or a profound correspondence is to be emphasized at the thematic level: the sea plays a very remarkable role in Debussy's music as well as in the poetry of the Ligurian Montale; often accompanied by the wind, a sonorous element which completes its figurative character, the sea is present in numerous compositions by the two artists as a source of inspiration, an interlocutor, and a descriptive, narrative or discursive pretext. A particular comment by Jarocinski is worth quoting: Monet's seascapes are never terrifying. We take part in the contemplation of the painter who is in a pantheistic accord with nature. But in Debussy's La mer everything seems to occur—as in Turner—at a cosmic level. In the final part of this polyrhythmic symphony, "Le dialogue du vent et de la mer," the woeful sound of the storm seems to announce death and destruction. The same impression emanates from the seventh prelude of book one, "Ce qu'a vu Ie vent de l'Ouest."43 It seems unnecessary to underscore how pertinent these remarks are to Montale's poetry as well, from "Arsenio" to "La bufera." But it is time now to verify the aspects of Debussy's influence on and consonance with Montale's texts.

3. "Minstrels" and "Corno inglese" I shall not devote a systematic analysis to "Accordi" and the other "musical" poems of the young Montale, but I will remark on some aspects of these poems that seem important; these remarks should be added to what critics like

Debussy and the Wind | 17 Marco Forti, Edoardo Sanguineti and Silvio Ramat have already pointed out.« A valuable testimony of a cultural season characterized by extraordinary intensity and fer­ vor, the suite of seven "Accordi" allows us to verify textually the incidence on Montale's poetry of contemporary Italian movements (Dannunzianism and "crepuscolarismo," already noted by critics), as well as of preceding and foreign ones: in particular, impressionism and sym­ bolism. Impressionism is traceable in verses like e a questa ciarla s'univano altre, ma piu gravi, e come bolle di vetro luminose intorno stellavano la notte che raggiava. Di contro al cielo buio erano sagome di perle, grandi flore di fuochi d'artifizio, cupole di cristallo . . . . and to this chat others were united, but more serious ones, and like luminous glass bubbles around they starred the radiating night. Against the dark sky there were outlines of pearls, great floras of fireworks, crystal domes . . . . These lines from "Flauti-Fagotti" (Flutes-bassoons) also display the analogic word and the alliteration of "grandi flore di fuochi d'artifizio." Symbolism is traceable not only in the typical use of capital letters in key words like "il Centro" (the Center) and "il Niente" (the Nothingness) in "Violoncelli" (Cellos), or "il Brutto" (the Ugly) in "Contrabbasso" (Contrabass), but also in the numerous cases of analogic words: for example, "Occhi corolle s'aprono / in me—chissa?—ο nel suolo" (Eyes corollas open u p / in m e — who knows?—or on the ground), with its chiasmatic struc-

18 I Chapter One ture in "Violini" (Violins), or the song that goes "nelle vene" (into the veins) and then "nel cuore" (into the heart) in "Violoncelli." Symbolism is also present in lexical dissonances such as the beautiful oxymoron of "Flauti-Fagotti": "gli occhi s'abbacinavano / in un gaio supplizio!" (the eyes were blinded / in a gay torment).45 The "Accordi" suite is a true orchestral rehearsal of themes and motives that will be found again throughout Montale's poetic oeuvre, from the expectation of a miracle to the greyness of daily life, from sadness to a fragile joy or rare happiness, from perplexity or existential bewilderment to the invention of the female interlocutor "tu"(you). But let us take up "Minstrels," the only poem derived explicitly "da C. Debussy," as the epigraph states, published under the title "Musica sognata" (Dreamed music) in the first edition of Ossi di seppia, then omitted because too explicit, and finally reinserted with its Debussyan title in the definitive edition.*6 Montale had heard Debussy's "Minstrels" in March, 1917. There is a detailed and revealing testimony of it in the poet's diary, recently published by Laura Barile with loving care: Concert. Last night concert at the Carlo Felice Theatre. Andre Hekking cellist and Luigi La Volpe pianist. I was there with Bonzi. Beautiful. Here is a resume. . . . Debussy, "Les collines d'Anacapri" and "Menestrels": descriptive and impressionistic music, filled with disconnectedness, colors, and meters. First it leaves you almost indifferent, if not hostile; but then it remains imprinted, as if in a nightmare; and you would like to hear it over and over. "Les collines" ends with a white key, dissonant and jarring like the cry of a lost bird. "Menestrels" is, or is taken to be, ironic music. Excellent performance. Why didn't I study music too? I have been asking myself for a long time. Who knows whether pure music wouldn't be my life! How

Debussy and the Wind | 19 many ideas flash in my mind, which might mislead the public!*? This diary entry, so sharp and impassionate, clearly shows the impact the encounter with Debussy's new music had on the young Montale. This music, although defined as "descriptive and impressionistic" (according to the criteria prevalent at the time) strikes the poet for its dissonance and irony, and above all "remains imprinted as if in a nightmare": so that it can be said that it is the occasionspur for the poem under examination—and by the way, the transformation of music into poetry is already present in the diary entry, in the beautiful simile of "a white key, dissonant and jarring like the cry of a lost bird." Let us listen then, first of all, to the musical text from which the poetic one was derived: it is the twelfth of the piano Preludes, and we might listen to the performance by Walter Gieseking, "the candid Gieseking" as Massimo MiIa calls him.*8 From a formal viewpoint, this piece is remarkable because it illustrates in specific terms my general presentation of Debussy: in it "the sequels of accords have no functional character. A quick design creates associations of sounds, and it would be useless to find a justification for this in the norms of traditional harmony." 40 It is the novelty of the rhythm that imposes itself, a bit as in "Golliwogg's Cakewalk." But perhaps, for the literary critic interested in the dialogic relationships of culture, the thematic aspects of this prelude are even more important than the formal ones. "Minstrels" is not the only piece by Debussy dealing with the same topic. It should be remembered that he set poems by Banville ("Pierrot") and Verlaine ("Fetes galantes"), in which, via Watteau, there are characters from the Italian commedia dell'arte: Colombine, Pierrot, and Harlequin, some of whom will reappear, together with Doctor Balanzone, in Debussy's ballet Masques et Bergamasques composed for Diaghilev in 1909. 50 We can in fact speak of

20 I Chapter One a true musical topos in this connection: Stravinsky's Petroushka appeared in 1911, Schonberg's Pierrot lunaire in 1912, and Stravinsky's Pulcinella in 1920.51 Even in contemporary iconography the mask, the clown, the minstrel, the mountebank become the protagonists of an entire pictorial story which links theatrical and musical motives, as can be seen in these few interconnected examples: Paul Cezanne's "Harlequin" (1888-1890), Pablo Picasso's "Harlequin and His Family" (1905), Georges Braque's "Man with Guitar" (1911), Picasso's "Harlequin with Violin" (1918), Gino Severini's sketch for Stravinsky's ballet Pulcinella (1920), and again Severini's and Picasso's "Masks" (1922 and 1921 respectively). Analogously, for the corresponding literary topos, we might first recall the figure of the philosopher-dancer in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but in any case Italian examples should suffice: Gian Pietro Lucini's "L'intermezzo dell'Arlecchinata" (1898), Corrado Govoni's "Le poesie d'Arlecchino" (1907), Ardengo Soffici's "Arlecchino" (1914), the Chaplinesque gestures of Italo Svevo's Zeno or the dissociations of Luigi Pirandello's Naked Masks, and above all the attitudes of the "crepuscolari" poets, culminating perhaps in the emblematic lines by Aldo Palazzeschi of 1909: Chi sono? Il saltimbanco dell'anima mia. Who am I? The mountebank of my soul. It is indeed a fascinating topos, which became the subject of an elegant and by now classic book by Jean Starobinski appropriately titled Portrait de I'artiste en saltimbanquefi* One of the reasons why this topos is so fascinating is that it is an expression (common to all forms of art) of what we might call the antiheroism of modern culture, to which we shall pay close attention in chapter 3. For the moment,

Debussy and the Wind | 21 against this background, we can now read Montale's own version of "Minstrels": Ritornello, rimbalzi tra Ie vetrate d'afa dell'estate. Acre groppo di note soffocate, riso che non esplode ma trapunge Ie ore vuote e Io suonano tre avanzi di baccanale vestiti di ritagli di giornali, con istrumenti mai veduti, simili a strani imbuti che si gonfiano a volte e poi s'afflosciano. Musica senza rumore che nasce dalle strade, s'innalza a stento e ricade, e si colora di tinte ora scarlatte ora biade, e inumidisce gli occhi, cosi che il mondo si vede come socchiudendo gli occhi nuotar nel biondo. Scatta ripiomba sfuma, poi riappare soffocata e lontana: si consuma. Non s'ode quasi, si respira. Bruci tu pure tra Ie lastre dell'estate, cuore che ti smarrisci! Ed ora incauto provi Ie ignote note sul tuo flauto. Refrain, you bounce among the summer sultriness' glass windows. Harsh knot of strangled notes, laughter which does not explode but embroiders the empty hours and three dregs of a revelry play it,

22 I Chapter One dressed with newspaper clips, with instruments never seen before similar to strange funnels which swell at times and then become flabby. Music without noise which is born from the streets, hardly rises and falls back, and is colored with dyes now scarlet now faded, and moistens the eyes, so that the world is seen as if half-closing the eyes swimming in the blond. It spurts plunges fades, then it reappears strangled and afar: it is consumed. It is not heard, almost, it is breathed. You burn too, among the slabs of summer, heart that gets lost! And now unwary you try the unknown notes on your flute. Montale adheres to Debussy's text first of all thematically: the subject of his poem is the music played by the minstrels of the title, or more specifically the strolling musicians suggested by the English noun, who become the "three dregs of a revelry" (or "paradoxical men" according to another version of the text), "dressed in newspaper clips" in the poet's very modern interpretation. Indeed they seem "snatched from some futurist collage," and certainly they are the "figurative correlatives," midway between fauvism and cubism, of the "primarily phonic and rhythmic essence" of this brief poem.53 It is to be noted that the kind of music in "Minstrels" is, specifically, a refrain, that is, a repetition-variation which is typically musical and is achieved accordingly by Montale with the second and the penultimate line ("tra Ie vetrate

Debussy and the Wind | 23

d'afa dell'estate"—"tu pure tra Ie lastre dell'estate") and with the comparison between the refrain itself and the heart, both of which burn in the summer heat. Finally, the musical subject is the very form of the poem, with its rhythm, now spurting, now nuanced, with the harsh sounds of its phonic texture (for instance "acre groppo di note soffocate"), and with the small dissonances of imperfect rhymes, such as rimbalzi—avanzi, esplode—vuote, and baccanale—giornali. With this "little thing" that tries to remake Debussy, Montale pays his cultural debt and leaves a precise indication about it for his readers. But this indication can be misleading, not because of what it says, but because of what it hides. In fact, the poem has a typically Montalean, poetic and metapoetic element, that "heart" which is here still uncertain (it gets lost like the heart of "Corno inglese," a "scordato strumento," a forgotten/untuned instrument), but already burns in the summer heat. This burning is nothing more than a hint here, but is very important because it will be developed later at crucial moments of Ossi * di seppia. From "Non rifugiarti nellOmbra" (Don't take refuge in the shade): tali i nostri animi arsi in cui l'illusione brucia un fuoco pieno di cenere. . . . such are our dry souls in which illusion burns a fire full of ash. . . . From "Cio che di me sapeste" (What you knew about me): il fuoco che non si smorza per me si chiamo: l'ignoranza. the fire that is not put out for me was called: ignorance.

24 J Chapter One

From "Mediterraneo": Non sono che faville d'un tirso. Bene Io so: bruciare questo, non altro, e il mio signincato. I am but sparks from a thyrsus. I know well: to burn, this, and nothing else, is my meaning. From "Crisalide" (Chrysalis): Penso . . . al rogo morente che s'avviva d'un arido paletto, e ferve trepido. I think . . . of the dying fire which is revived by a dry small pole, and burns trembling. These are all crucial moments for the poet's self-awareness: starting unwarily from the unkown notes of his flute in "Minstrels," he will arrive at the splendid results of "the burnt one" par excellence, "Arsenio." It should also be noted that the choice of "Minstrels," besides being determined (occasion-spur) by Debussy's piece performed at the 1917 concert, can and perhaps should be interpreted as a reflection or meditation by Montale on the role of the poet in today's society: if we listen to the Benjamin of the essay on Baudelaire, the climate has become increasingly inhospitable for modern poetry, because the lyric poet "has ceased to represent the poet per se. He no longer is a [bard] as Lamartine still was; he has become a representative of a [marginal and hardly tolerated] genre." 54 But meanwhile Montale develops the motif of the heart, already metonymic of poetry being born, in another poem even more Debussyan than "Minstrels," that is, "Corno inglese," the only one retained from the "Accordi" suite

Debussy and the Wind | 25

from the very beginning, without hesitation or second thoughts. It is by far the major poetic achievement of the young Montale. Il vento che stasera suona attento —ricorda un forte scotere di lame— gli strumenti dei fitti alberi e spazza l'orizzonte di rame dove strisce di luce si protendono come aquiloni al cielo che rimbomba (Nuvole in viaggio, chiari reami di lassu! D'alti Eldoradi malchiuse porte!) e il mare che scaglia a scaglia, livido, muta colore, lancia a terra una tromba di schiume intorte; il vento che nasce e muore nell'ora che lenta s'annera suonasse te pure stasera scordato strumento, cuore.55 The wind that tonight plays attentive —it reminds of a strong shaking of plates— the instruments of the thick trees and sweeps the copper horizon where strips of light stretch out like kites toward the sky that resounds (Traveling clouds, clear realms up above! Of high Eldorados unclosed doors!) and the sea which scale by scale, livid, changes color, thrusts to the shore a whirl of twisted foams; the wind that is born and dies in the hour that slowly darkens

26 I Chapter One

wish it played you too tonight, forgotten/untuned instrument, heart. This brief composition contains many data of Montale's Debussyan experience, from the very title, an echo of the musician's predilection for the English horn,s 6 to the precise thematic references to the two piano preludes "Le vent sur la plaine" and "Ce qu'a vu Ie vent de l'Ouest" and to the third part of the symphonic poem La mer, "Le dialogue du vent et de la mer." But these data are transcended and fused into a structure which is already, entirely and powerfully, Montalean—beginning with the metaphoric value of the title, wholly confirmed by a translation Montale made of Emily Dickinson's "The Storm" in 1945: "There came a wind like a bugle" is rendered in Italian as "Con un suono di corno I il vento arrivo." 57 The thematic importance of "Corno inglese" derives from the fact that the noun "wind" on which it is based is the very first of the entire oeuvre in verse, the beginning of "In limine" (On the threshold), the introductory poem of Ossi.s8 Godi se il vento ch'entra nel pomario vi rimena l'ondata della vita. Enjoy it, if the wind entering the apple-orchard brings back the wave of life. This beginning emblematically defines not only the liminality of Montale's poetry,59 but its double poetic space, the inner and the external, according to the by now classic schema by Juri Lotman, so important to understand the poetic text. 60 Above all, this beginning presents the dynamic and creative function of the wind in Montale's poetry as absolutely primary. In this connection, one should read again the beautiful pages devoted by M. H. Abrams to "The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor," 6 ' where the critic points out the frequency of words like "wind, breath,

Debussy and the Wind | 27 , exterior = life

interior = apple-orchard

-«

wind

wall

ι

_! ι. Space in "In limine.'

blow" in the high romantic English poetry; he describes their effect on the poet's " h a r p " or "Aeolian lyre" in that they cause "a renewal of life and emotional vigor after ap­ athy and a deathlike torpor, and an outburst of creative power following a period of imaginative sterility." Abrams traces the origins and the history of this topos in both pa­ gan and Christian literature, of which romantic poetry is a lay, secularized version—"yet the religious element re­ mains as at least a formal parallel, or a verbal or rhetorical echo." Finally he vindicates the specificity of the romantic wind in that Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley make it "peculiarly apt for the philosophical, political, and aes­ thetic preoccupations of the age," namely organicism, rev­ olution, and creativity. 62 I have no doubt that Montale takes u p or echoes the ro­ mantic topos of the inspiring wind, adapting it to his own sensitivity and culture (the Debussyan filter is itself signifi­ cant). 6 3 It is the wind that in " I n limine" makes possible "il commuoversi dell'eterno grembo" (the moving of the eter­ nal womb), the transformation of the "pomario" (apple-or­ chard) into a "crogiuolo" (crucible); it is the wind that

28 I Chapter One

causes a "rovello" (rage), as well as a desire to proceed and save others: Cerca una maglia rotta nella rete che ci stringe, tu balza fuori, fuggi! Look for a broken mesh in the net which grips us, j u m p out, flee! One cannot sufficiently emphasize the salvific valence of Montale's poetry, his precise intentionality which struc­ tures so much of his poetic work toward that end. 6 4 I shall only quote a paradigmatic example from the later "Casa sul m a r e " (House by the sea), where the "passaggio" (pas­ sage) beyond the "varco" (opening) and the "via di fuga" (path to flight) singularly echo the exhortation of "In li­ mine" (and the passage, the passing, is certainly the fun­ damental element of liminality, both poetic and anthro­ pological): Penso che per i piu non sia salvezza, ma taluno sovverta ogni disegno, passi il varco, qual voile si ritrovi. Vorrei prima di cedere segnarti codesta via di fuga labile come nei sommossi campi del mare spuma ο ruga. Ti dono anche l'avara mia speranza. 6 5 I think that for most men there is no salvation, but someone may subvert every design, pass through the opening, find himself as he wanted. I'd like, before yielding, to point out for you this path of flight fleeting as in the stirred fields of the sea foam or furrow. I give you even my meager hope. But in the meantime, keeping firmly in mind the valence and the intention made explicit by the wind, let us go back

Debussy and the Wind | 29 to "Corno inglese." It is a poetic construction containing a seascape, an affective experience, and a musical moment, all fused in an extraordinary unity. It is a small concentrate, a self-sufficient microcosm of Montale's themes, images, and techniques, in a circular structure which closes upon itself at the phonic, lexical, and syntactic levels. At the phonic level, "Corno inglese" is entirely played on the contrast-complement (dissonance-harmony) between on the one hand the sibilant and fricative sounds (onomatopoetic or at least suggestive of the wind) of the consonant groups 5, st, str, and zz (stasera, iuona, icotere, sirumenti, spazza, orizzonte, .suonas.se, siasera, scordato, and sirumento), and on the other hand, the sounds of the nasal, labial, and dental groups ent and omba (vercto, attento, strumenii, orizzonie, the variant protewdono at the beginning of the poem, rimbomba and tromba in the middle, and then venio, \enta, and strumewto at the end). This dissonance-harmony is resolved in the liquid sound of the final "cuore"—and incidentally, there might be a Stravinskyan suggestion, too, in this contrastive-harmonic structure: to limit the influence of the new music to Debussy alone would wrong Montale. The phonic texture of the poem, compact in its repetitions, is the musical basis for the lexical-semantic level, which is in turn itself oriented toward the specific area of musicality: "plays" and "wish it played," "instruments" on the second line and "instrument" on the penultimate seem to attract other signifiers, such as "resounds" and "whirl," which are obviously used for different signifieds ("tromba," in particular, means "trumpet" as well as "whirl"). In their turn, the sememes "the wind" (repeated twice, on the first and fourteenth lines), "the sea," and "the horizon" refer to a very simple spatial situation, which is defined temporally by "tonight" on the first and sixteenth lines, but is above all interiorized and related to the final and intensely affective vocative, "heart." At this level, the visual, pictorial power of Montale's poetry should also be

30 I Chapter One

emphasized, because it completes and intertwines with the evident musicality of segments like "a strong shaking of plates" or "the instruments of the thick trees": one thinks of the images "copper horizon I where strips of light stretch out / like kites," "traveling clouds," "the sea which scale by scale, I livid, changes color," and "a whirl of twisted foams." The preciosity of certain lexical choices should then be noted: "scotere," "scaglia" (referred to the sea, as in "Meriggiare"), 66 "intorte"; certain plurals seem derived from Giacomo Leopardi and contribute to the poetic vagueness of the composition ("nuvole, reami, Eldoradi, porte"); and above all we should emphasize the ambiguity of "scordato," which, with its overlapping meanings of "discordant" or "untuned" and "forgotten" referred both to "strumento" and "cuore," overcomes the "crepuscolarismo" inherent in the final sememe. In fact, the sort of masked paronomasia resulting from the linking of scordato and cuore, both of which contain the sound of the title, corno, seems almost to suggest, without asserting it, that the poetic voice remains in the end discordant. The unity of the composition is further stressed by the numerous rhymes, internal rhymes and quasi-rhymes (or imperfect rhymes): vento attento strumenti protendono lame rame rimbomba tromba porte intorte colore muore cuore vento lenta strumento s'annera stasera.6? Above all, one should note the great effectiveness of the rhyme of "attento" (first line) and "strumento" (penultimate line): it is the most deliberate, the most intellectual of all, and is used to bring the beginning of the poem back to its conclusion, to make the wind and the heart, nature and

Debussy and the Wind | 31 the poetic voice resound again together, with an echo effect which attenuates the circular closure of the poem (one is reminded of Shelley's final invocation of the wind, in "Ode to the West Wind": "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is").68 All the phenomena of the phonic and lexical levels examined so far can be grouped, as Morton Bloomfield does when he expands an insight by Roman Jakobson, in the category of linguistic repetition which has a high metonymic or contextual function, that is, it serves to call the reader's attention to poetic language as such (intransitivity).69 At the syntactic level, for the first time in Montale's work, we see a poem construed on a single sentence, as will be the case with the later "L'anguilla" (The eel) in La bufera. This sentence is undoubtedly "a rhythmic, musical unit," 70 and could be transcribed graphically in order to reveal its structure visually. T h e principal sentence is the equivalent of the melodic line in a musical composition, and the secondary clauses are the harmonic materials; the relationship between the two syntactic elements is unbalanced, favoring the latter, whereby a new and different rhythm is created in the structure of the poem, a rhythm that can be clearly perceived even visually in the schema below (fig. 2). It is a single sentence whose syntax is rhetorically repetitive and suspended, carrying a great poetic effectiveness: the declarative clause "the wind thrusts to the shore a whirl of twisted foams" becomes an optative clause, "wish it played you too, heart." Of course, it is also possible to interpret the syntax of the poem in the sense that it is "the sea" that "thrusts to the shore a whirl": 7 ' in this case there would be a principal sentence in the optative mood only, and with the subject repeated twice. The latter interpretation is tempting for its linearity, but seems less persuasive than the one I have highlighted, because it takes away dramatic force from the very wind which is the grammatical subject, the occasion of

Principal Sentence

Secondary Clauses

T h e wind plays the trees —shaking of plates— - and sweeps

r

the horizon where strips stretch out ' toward the sky that resounds

(clouds, Eldorados) and the sea that changes color thrusts a whirl; the wind that r is born L and dies in the hour that darkens wish it played you too, heart. 2. Syntax of "Corno inglese."

Debussy and the Wind | 33

the poem, the antagonist of the poet. Such an interpretation also does not account for the fact that, at the strictly syntactical level, two verbs linked paratactically by a comma (a comma, furthermore, which was added only in the definitive edition: "the sea . . . changes color, thrusts . . .") are certainly unusual in Montale; and finally, in the description of another sea storm, the later one of "Arsenio," it is again the wind that predominates, grammatically, over the sea: the "tromba di piombo, alta sui gorghi" (laden whirl, high over the waves) is a "salso nembo vorticante, soffiato dal ribelle elemento alle nubi" (salty, whirling spray, blown by the rebellious element toward the clouds). Yet, what actually matters is exactly the possibility of the double interpretation, just as in the case of the "scordato strumento" at the lexical-semantic level: it is a specific case of that "syntactic ambiguity" which according to Bloomfield is a poetic device capable of calling our attention to the context, to make us "hesitate on it" and make us aware of its "intransitivity," which forbids an early j u m p toward the "referential meaning" of the single words taken individually.?2 In this context, which is made even more metonymically poetic by the ambiguous syntax, all the numerous secondary and even incidental clauses are governed by the only subject, "the wind," in a "Chinese box" structure culminating in the central parenthetic segment (in what might be called a syntactic oxymoron). This segment between parentheses is a nominal sentence, without a verb, but clearly related to the subject and the object of the principal clause: the clouds are traveling, blown by the wind, as if, according to the heart, they had their final destination in the high Eldorados (which, incidentally, recall "Ie trombe d'oro della solarita," the golden trumpets of solarity of "I Iimoni," also linked by "malchiuse porte" and "malchiuso portone"). T h e nominal clause can be perceived as a true musical phrase in the major (notice "clear, high, up above,"

34 I Chapter One

and the two exclamation points) in dissonance or contrast with the rest of the composition in the minor (with the connotations "copper, livid, twisted, darkens"). Therefore, the parenthetic sentence becomes the syntactic, visual, musical, and affective focus of the whole poem: it produces a fundamental dissonance, underlined and contained by the parentheses which lengthen the already wide distance between the subject and the object, between nature and the poet. Another indication of this dissonance can be found at the metrical level, in which the free use of traditional verses ranges from the hendecasyllable to the final senarius ("scordato strumento") and two-syllable line ("cuore"), both of which are rather unusual in the canon of Italian lyric poetry. 73 "Corno inglese" expresses for the first time, but in a less dramatic tone, the same situation that will be developed completely and emblematically in the later "Arsenio": in the dialogue between immobility and movement, between the poet and the world, the central parenthetic sentence overcomes the potentially tragic connotations; it is an opening on and of the imagination, hope, and Sehnsucht of the poet who contemplates the storm, "the whirl of twisted foams." T h e parentheses enclose (are) a "varco," the opening Montale points out and wishes in "In limine," 74 and the one perhaps found by Esterina, the Debussyan "jeune fille aux cheveux de Hn," in "Falsetto": she is "come spiccata da un vento" (as if blown by a wind), the poet is "della razza di chi rimane a terra" (of the race of the ones who remain ashore). In "Corno inglese" we are dealing with an imaginary opening, a conceptual and hypothetical one, which, however, is there, present and inviting, actualized by the invocation at the center of the poem born from the Debussyan and Ligurian music of the wind." The wind which, at the denotative-mimetic level, causes the stormy whirl, is also the wind which, at the connotative-expressive level, according to the wish of the poet should produce a music

Debussy and the Wind | 35

capable of moving the untuned instrument of the heart. In any case, Montale does not describe a seascape and does not simply express a state of mind; he tries, through the poetic devices we have examined, to tear the appearances, to rip the veil, to reach (like Debussy, like Mallarme) something essential. That his is an effort, and not an achievement, is inherent in the optative and parenthetic expression. "Corno inglese" is the moment of greatest fusion between poetry and music in Montale, the moment when the occasion-music is transformed, truly and definitely, into poetry.

Ut Figura Poesis

Phrases came. Visions came. Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything. VIRGINIA wooLF, To the Lighthouse

Poetry and Painting T h e musicologist and art collector Luigi Magnani tells an anecdote about a visit to his Roman house by Giorgio Morandi: After having carefully looked at a small painting on the fireplace in the library, . . . he said, "This is perhaps the most beautiful painting you have here." This judgment could not sound very flattering to my ears, but it should have been so for the author of that painting, which I handed to Morandi so that he could read in the back, under the dedication, the signature of Eugenio Montale. This anecdote is used by Magnani to emphasize the "almost exclusive predilection" Morandi had for "the kind of painting in which he could recognize himself": "In fact that painting, the work of a genial dilettante, showed an 36

Ut Figura Poesis | 37 intimate correspondence with Morandi's poetic vision, be­ cause of its essential structure and sober tones." 1 Of course I do not wish to underestimate the documen­ tary and interpretive importance, for the literary critic, of Montale's pictorial work. Suffice it to think that the poet himself, in "L'arte povera" (The poor art) from Diario del 'yi, evokes the prevailing colors of his paintings ("Vino e caffe, tracce di dentrificio," wine and coffee, smears of toothpaste) and the occasional materials on which they were painted (such as "carta blu da zucchero ο cannele da imballo," blue paper once used to wrap sugar, or paper for packaging); he has also drawn an interesting conclusion: E' la parte di me che riesce a sopravvivere del nulla ch'era in me, del tutto ch'eri tu, inconsapevole. 2 It is the part of me that succeeds in surviving out of the nothingness that was in me, of the whole that was you, unaware. A critic has justly noted that Montale's thematization of his own painting, his artistic activity that was "the least en­ gaged, entirely marginal," and his transforming it into "a metaphor of his entire existence as man and artist, is char­ acteristic of the 'soft-voiced' Montale at his best. T h e path 3 of negation leads to the discovery of differential values." Nevertheless, once we have recognized the existential and artistic importance of the paintings by the genial dilettante Eugenio Montale, it is time to devote some attention to the subject of the present research. This subject is not the cor­ respondence of Montale's pictorial works with his poetry on the one hand, and with Morandi's paintings on the other; it is the homology between poetry and the visual arts, and particularly between the early poems of Ossi di seppia and Morandi's etchings. To deal with this subject I go back first to the "imaginary

38 I Chapter Two

interview" from which we started, and which is the most explicit statement of the young poet's interest in modern painting. But my treatment will be different from that of Debussy's music: I wish to approach the question by starting not from a textual verification or a historiographic documentation, but from general considerations of a theoretical nature. First of all, there is a methodological hypothesis: it is possible to compare literature and the visual arts as texts, as modeling systems that are autonomous in themselves but also parts—and homologous parts—of that other modeling system we call culture.* On the one hand, such a hypothesis implies the obvious acknowledgment of the great interest painting has always provoked among writers;5 on the other, with its emphasis on methodology, it tries (at least partially) to obviate whatever too subjective or unsystematic has been presented so far on the subject.6 But the possibility of such a comparison should not be taken lightly, because the literary and the visual texts are normally "read" in different ways (the former in a syntagmatic progression, the latter by scanning, with pauses and accentuations in the eye's trajectory); 7 and because the metalanguages of art criticism and literary criticism differ as well (the former is ostensive and oblique, unlike the latter). 8 Before I state my position, I wish briefly to discuss some major contemporary contributions toward a development of the comparison between literature and the visual arts. I shall begin with two books, Etudes semiologiques by Louis Marin and Discourse, figure by Jean-Frangois Lyotard.e Marin is perhaps more indirect than Lyotard in his approach, which is aimed primarily at a transcoding of the pictorial text into the metalanguage of criticism, but because of the linguistic basis of this metalanguage, the possibility for the comparison between painting and literature is strongly affirmed. Furthermore, he is interested in the ideological and narrative qualities of painting (as demonstrated by his analyses of Philippe de Champagne and

Ut Figura Poesis | 39 Poussin). 10 Marin uses a decidedly linguistic-semiotic approach: he speaks of pictorial syntagmatics, figures which are also units of meaning; of paradigmatics, stylistics and thematics of a painting; of pictorial codes (for example, in the analogic code of iconic painting the distinction between meaning and reference is masked [p. 29]); and of elementary structures of pictorial meaning, based upon the relationships among differential elements, for example, the polarized semantic axes (p. 39). Whether we speak of "symbolic" or "referential" works of art, we have to insist on the fact that "every pictorial object is truly such only when that opposition is superseded in the total unity of the work" (p. 42); therefore we can speak of the work as a "hypersign" (although Marin does not use such a term), which has to be considered in its "absolute autonomy" and as "designating only itself" (p. 34). Clearly, Marin performs a reading and an interpretation of pictorial texts. By contrast, Lyotard is more radical than Marin: he plunges directly into the comparison between visual arts and literature, and privileges poetry rather than fiction. Above all he uses a deconstructive approach which reverses traditional notions. 11 Pursuing a well-known Derridean polemic, Lyotard says that we have difficulty in seeing the figural because we are accustomed to reading the discursive (p. 218). We have to recognize that painting is not like language; on the contrary it is language "inhabited by figures" (pp. 250-83). "Poetic language obeys not a generative grammar" of the kind we have seen in musical language according to Bernstein's interpretation, but "another order of production of meaning" (p. 310), the same order, precisely, that governs figural space. It is the order of the unconscious, of a phantasmatic matrix which is invisible but produces figure-forms and figure-images exactly like poetical figures in which the fundamental laws of language are rejected (see pp. 311-12 for a "reasonable table of poetic follies," compiled after the British linguist H. G. Widdowson). In every work of art, then, there is an

40 I Chapter Two

oscillation, a tension between discourse and figure, between the realistic and the imaginary: its dimension as play depends precisely on the insertion of what is serious, linguistic, tied, within the element of difference, of free mobility (p. 382). It is interesting to note that Wolfgang Iser, starting from completely different assumptions from Lyotard's, arrives at exactly the same conclusion concerning literary texts, when he says that "as the gestalt of the imaginary, fiction cannot be defined as counter-factual to existing realities. Fiction reveals itself as a product of the imaginary insofar as it lays bare its fictionality, and yet it appears to be a halfway house between the imaginary and the real." 12 But even more interesting—indeed, striking—is that Gilbert Durand preceded Lyotard by a decade in advocating a revaluation of the imaginary, not within a deconstructive strategy of re-inscription but by pursuing an anthropological inquiry. 13 Durand asserts that figural meaning always comes before conceptual meaning: space is the a priori form of the imaginary, and its qualities of ocularity, depth, and ubiquity concur in enhancing its "euphemistic function" against the putrefaction of death, because they cause ambivalence (p. 411). However, even if this space of the imaginary is primary for Durand, it is nonetheless necessary to retrace the trajectory between the semasiologic level of symbols and the semiotic level of discourse (the formalism of logic). This trajectory, this passage, is made possible by rhetoric, "intermediary between the imaginary and reason," which "supersedes the restrictions of logic through a series of the imaginary's bastard proceedings" (P- 421): The elementary translation of every rhetoric is nothing but the Euclidian property of translation, because rhetoric, like logic, expresses and thinks itself in terms of space. Just as space is the form of the imaginary in its struggle against destiny, so metaphor is its process

Ut Figura Poesis | 41 of expression, the power of the spirit, whenever it thinks, to renew its terminology, to snatch it from its etymological destiny, (p. 422) Durand's statement that space is the a priori form of the imaginary should be usefully integrated with E. H. Gombrich's research on visual arts: this research is supported by Karl Popper's scientific, dynamic concepts and leads to a consideration of perception as an active process, of the type we have seen at work in the first chapter, in connection with the impressionists' technique; this process implies memory and anticipation as well, and unfolds entirely between the opposite poles of redundancy and constraint— the elements of the artistic message studied especially in semiotics (the former) and in aesthetics (the latter). 14 In any case, Durand's conclusions could appropriately be related to a recent "plea for visual thinking" made by Rudolf Arnheim, as well as to Pierre Francastel's "figurative thought": they are all based on the preeminence of the spatial and its interaction with expression (or logic, discourse, or language). 15 This preeminence is also vigorously asserted by W J . T . Mitchell, who expands Joseph Frank's notion of "spatial form" in modernist literature and makes of it "a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and all cultures" (he even suggests the use of the adjective "tectonic" instead of "spatial" in order to stress the visual and structural approach of his proposal). 16 Finally, I should mention a contribution by Marc-Eli Blanchard, who reaffirms the priority of description over narrativity, because description is the area where the dialectics between language and desire is most remarkable. 1 ' It seems clear that a great effort in contemporary thought is devoted to reassess, to clarify, and to unify the basic modes of expressing, understanding, and communicating man's experience. In such a cognitive process, the inquiry into "the language of images" in general and more

42 I Chapter Two

particularly into the homology of literature and painting is central, and is causing a thorough questioning of such notions as the imaginary and the discursive, or the intuitive and the intellectual, or the figural and the logical, as well as of the ontological foundations on which these notions are based and their operational functions. I think that the primacy of the imaginary has to be recognized and accepted, and we should also take into account its archetypal qualities (here Durand's Jungianism appears more promising than Lyotard's Freudianism). Such a recognition should help to correlate poetry and painting (or any other forms of art) as expressions of culture. For this attempt semiotics seems to be an indispensable, but not exclusive, tool. In fact, semiotics recognizes that, in Lotman's words, "The special character of visual perception inherent to man is such that visible spatial objects serve as the denotata of verbal signs; as a result verbal models are perceived in a particular way. The iconic principle and a graphic quality are wholly peculiar to verbal models as well."18 The iconic principle and a graphic quality are visual, spatial characteristics which are primary (Durand would say that they are the imaginary) and which as such "inhabit" verbal models, including rhetoric. Once and because such primacy is recognized, then the language of the figural can be explored in its component parts, laws, and governing mechanisms, and finally transcoded into the metalanguage of a criticism that brackets metaphysics and considers itself as an operational, cognitive moment in the search for a description and definition of culture. T h e preceding considerations should clear the way for my second presupposition, which actually is a historical concern: although I am not particularly keen on periodization, I do recognize the importance of certain broadly defined cultural periods. 19 Eugenio Montale was born in 1896 and died in 1981; Giorgio Morandi was born in 1890 and died in 1964; they belong to the same generation and share the same European culture of the beginning of this

Ut Figura Poesis | 43

century and the same Italian tradition culminating (for instance and in particular) in the reviews La Voce, a vital presence until 1916, La Ronda (1919-22), and Valori plastici (1918-22). 20 We are clearly dealing with the crucial years for the formation and the beginnings of the two artists. My third presupposition is a value judgment: I consider Montale as a great twentieth-century poet and Morandi as an equally great contemporary painter and engraver; few literary critics and, I believe, few art critics would dispute such a judgment. 2 1 However, the implication is that I privilege the relationship between Montale and Morandi above others that are equally possible but perhaps less significant. An example might be the following, suggested by Montale himself: Dino Campana's orphic poetry coincides with the beginnings in Italy of a metaphysical painting (Carra, De Chirico), whose presence and intentions could not be ignored by Campana. Like the early De Chirico, Campana, too, is a suggestive evocator of Italian cities: Bologna, Faenza, Florence, Genoa flash in his poems and inspire some of his highest moments. Perhaps his "barbaric" or if you prefer ancient aspect is an indication of Campana's latent hearkening back to [the fin de siecle neo-classical poet] Giosue Carducci? 22 An indirect reply to Montale's question is given by the art critic Maurizio Calvesi, who, in documenting De Chirico's cultural formation in a Florence dominated by Giovanni Papini, establishes a precise relationship D'Annunzio-Campana-De Chirico, thus retrieving D'Annunzio's Le citta del silenzio (The cities of silence), forgotten—deliberately?—by Montale. 23 Aside from Montale's anti-Dannunzian coherence (the reasons for his Debussyan choice should be recalled in this context), the relationship between the "imagine" poet, the "orphic" poet, and the "metaphysical" painter is certainly significant for an entire area of Italian (European) culture. But this area is anti-

44 I Chapter Two thetical to both Montale's and Morandi's. Hence we should mention at least some other, more congenial, possible relationships, before proceeding: for instance, Montale-De Pisis (which would be authorized also by a poem in Le occasions), or Montale-Carra (because of their Tyrrenian and possibly "metaphysical" themes), 24 or, on the other hand, Morandi-Cardarelli (in 1929 Morandi illustrated with twenty-two drawings a collection of Cardarelli's poems and prose pieces, Il sole a picco, but their "classicism," rooted in La Ronda, could be too easily misunderstood or overemphasized). 25 The fourth presupposition is a thematic, formal, and epistemological choice: among the many possible aspects of the Montalean and Morandian works, I have emphasized their insistence on objects (cuttlefish bones, bottles) and landscapes (Ligurian sea coast, Apennines slopes and houses). They play a very precise role in their respective artists' organization of their art and view of man and the world. Of course I am not the first (and perhaps shall not be the last) to make the connection between Montale and Morandi. For instance, during his visit to some American universities in 1959 Italo Calvino stated, in a clearly discursive manner: The rigor of Montale's poetry, the rigor of Giorgio Morandi's paintings, those still lifes of bottles in which the cold exactness of light envelops the humble reality of things, the rigor of Romano Bilenchi's fiction, the absolute dryness of his meager provincial stories; this was our inheritance from their "hermeticism." It is not a meager inheritance: Montale, Morandi, and Bilenchi taught us to hold to the essential in everything; they taught us that what we can be sure of is very little and must be endured to the very end. It was a lesson in stoicism.26 Calvino's statement is certainly peremptory, from a personal, a conceptual, and a historical viewpoint. I shall re-

Ut Figura Poesis | 45 turn to it later on, but for the moment let me quote a parallel assertion from an art critic, the late Francesco Arcangeli, perhaps the best interpreter of the Bolognese painter: Morandi, the latest chronologically in the great generation of Picasso, Braque, Carra, and De Chirico, is the first, or among the first ones, in a generation of solitary explorers of the unknown: he belongs with Soutine, with Tobey, with Fautrier, with Eliot, with Montale. . . . Their poetics, whether figurative or nonfigurative, may be different from one another; but the sense of life in these men is analogous, as is their humble, but universally valid, inquiry into the ineliminable corners of existence, into the hie et nunc, a fistful of soil or a discarded cup, a meager nude or a cuttlefish bone, a galaxy or a distant city or a "waste land." 27 More specifically, Arcangeli notes that in the twenties and early thirties "in Italy only Montale is closely akin to a Morandi he does not even know," and quotes such "programmatic lines from Ossi di seppia as "Non chiederci la parola che squadri da ogni lato I l'animo nostro informe" (Don't ask us for the word that squares I our formless soul from every side), "E ora di guardare Ie forme della vita che si sgretola" (It's time to look at the forms of a life that is crumbling), and "Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, I cio che non siamo, cio che non vogliamo" (All we can say today is I what we are not, what we do not want). It seems clear from the preceding remarks that Calvino and Arcangeli link Montale and Morandi at a conceptual level and interpret their art as the carrier of a moral and epistemological "lesson"—that is, of a message conveyed through distinct but converging cultural codes, according to the dialogic principle by Bakhtin to which any conception of culture should always refer. 28 This principle has remarkable resemblances, or even a necessary integration, with the aesthetics of reception by Hans Robert Jauss and the Constance school, 2^ not to mention Gombrich's theory

46 I Chapter Two

of perception again. In fact, the parallel quotations from Calvino and Arcangeli clearly show that what happens in the addressee-reader of literary and figurative texts is projected also onto the forms of the perceived, artistic object: the correlation of a cultural system, which is at the same time a process of aesthetic sensitivity and of historical consciousness, establishes itself precisely in the active memory of the sympathetic addressee, even beyond the intentions of the artist-sender. For my part, I accept such a correlation between Montale and Morandi as a preliminary point of departure, and shall proceed in my analysis by limiting the comparison to some etchings and some of the poems of Ossi di seppia only.3° By delimiting the field of inquiry, I hope to have the advantage of specificity and to be able to explore the thematic and the formal levels of the cultural datum posited as a starting point.

2. Giorgio Morandi Among contemporary Italian painters, Morandi is rightly famous for his still lifes and for being an engraver as well as a painter. Both characteristics are important. Marin says that a still life (a "nature morte") is a silent life which, however, speaks, and in examining the example of Chardin, one of Morandi's predecessors, he explains, "The revolutionary greatness of Chardin is that (by applying the canons of grand manner classical painting to still life) he has shown pictorially that beneath the socialized institution of codes of understanding and of valorization there lay a profound unity and autonomy of the pictorial order."3' Marin also remarks that for Chardin objects are the "occasional pre-text" for the study of light and matter (p. 93). It is a very revealing coincidence that some of these words had already been used by Ardengo Soffici in a 1912 article in La Voce on painting in general (with the fundamental variation "necessary pretexts"), and that they return again in

Ut Figura Poesis | 47 Roberto Longhi and in Arcangeli (p. 27) to describe Morandi. In Longhi's words, "useless objects, unpleasant landscapes, seasonal flowers are the more than sufficient pretexts to express oneself 'through form'; and it is well known that one expresses only sentiments"; unlike the impressionists, Morandi uses these objects as "necessary symbols, terms ["vocaboli"] sufficient to avoid the shoals of absolute abstractness. This is so true that, from the same material pretext, he was able to render different sentimental timbres and to bend his grave, luminous elegy into ever-changing patterns." 32 The necessity of these pretexts (pre-texts) is fundamental for my analysis as well, because it dispels from the start any possible doubt about a purely formalistic conception of art, and of Morandi's art in particular's Morandi's art concentrates on objects and therefore it "discards the human figure," but such a "silence" is perhaps "the supreme homage of a by now desperate humanist to an image of man which is unrepeatable for the time being." In fact, modern art has been "unable to give anything but rhetorical, false, and hence short-lived images of man-the-hero, or at least of a man who is the master of himself and his destiny: here is a reason for Morandi's own destiny as a painter of landscapes and still lifes," says Arcangeli. 34 And another art critic, Lamberto Vitali, echoes, "If man is seemingly absent from [Morandi's] representations, they live, however, as functions of the human." 3 5 It should also be noted that still lifes constitute "a humble genre in comparison with sacred or historical subject painting." 36 Both epistemologically and formally, Morandi holds a very precise position, which is reinforced by his choice to work as an engraver (specifically, an engraver of etchings on copper or zinc plates). 37 In fact, the significance of his choice of the humble still life is heightened by his interest in etching, where color is discarded, and the inquiry into the nature of life and its forms is left entirely to black and white, to lines and surfaces. Besides, etching

48 I Chapter Two

is also significant on another account: it is, as Benjamin has it, a typical "work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," it is an art form par excellence in the modern world—and Morandi knew it. The corpus of Morandi's etchings, collated and ordered by Vitali,38 is impressive indeed: it is made up of 132 pieces, spanning from 1912 to 1956; of these, only five are portraits, only five deal with the human figure; all the others are still lifes and landscapes, and can be read as a macrotext, a long fidelity to a few fundamental themes subjected to an inexhaustible exploration through variation, one of the "mystical structures of the imaginary" according to Durand.3 9 Furthermore, Amy Namowitz Worthen has correctly remarked that three-fourths of Morandi's etched works belong to the period 1927-1933: "In those years Morandi was forging his mature style and outlook. One is tempted to conclude that Morandi's uniquely personal vision was being formed and worked out primarily in the etchings. The rate of production in those years cannot simply be explained by his technical attraction to the medium, but rather by the excitement of the pursuit and creation of that vision of the essence of forms."*0 I believe that this explanation, which goes well beyond the years and the technical means in question, can also be used satisfactorily to justify my own choice of dealing with Morandi as an etcher: a synecdochic choice, in which truly the part stands for the whole. Let us then look at, that is, read and interpret, some of these etchings. First, a series of objects. Here is a Still Life with Sugar Bowl, a Lemon, and Bread (1921 or 1922, fig. 3): the temptation to quote Montale's "I limoni" is almost irresistible, but what really matters is Morandi's own diminutio antiaulica in his choice of these domestic objects and in his rendering of them through his "reticolo," a mesh or network of thin lines closely interwoven both in the foreground and in the background, leaving an area of white surfaces in the middle, clearly marked by the contours, but also softly

Ut Figura Poesis | 49

3. Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Sugar Bowl, a Lemon and Bread, 1921 or 1922.

blended together by zones of chiaroscuro along the margins; the volumes stand out, the objects are there to be seen in front of us. This etching can be considered as one of the first and simplest examples of the many compositions on the same subject done by Morandi. Here is a Still Life with Bread Basket (1921, fig. 4), in which chiaroscuro and perspective define the volumes, the tonality of light is subdued, the grouping of the objects on the table is seemingly random but actually carefully controlled, and the network of crisscrossing and parallel lines thickens and lightens. The interplay between white surfaces and dark ones, between chiaroscuro and perspective, between the grammar of the mesh and the syntax of the composition is also exemplified by the Still Life with Drapery on the Left (1927, fig. 5), in which it should be noted that

4- G i o r g i o M o r a n d i , Still Life with Bread Basket, 1921.

5. G i o r g i o M o r a n d i , Still Life with Drapery on the Left, 1927.

Ut Figura Poesis | 51 the "drapery on the left" is not a sumptuous drapery of the type we associate with a gothic or a baroque Madonna (on a paradigmatic axis), but is a small piece of cloth, perhaps a kitchen towel, hanging down the edge of the cabinet on which the bottles and the basket are placed, thereby contributing to the domestic scene and to its balance (on the syntagmatic axis). In short, this drapery is a good example of how a pictorial unit of meaning draws our attention to the autonomy of the pictorial order and its codes, of how we can read a pictorial text and interpret it in cultural terms. Another stupendous variation is the Large, Dark Still Life (1934, fig. 6), which displays a tremendously minute network and is indeed "close and compact like a wall, on which a distant light barely filters through,"* 1 and in which "the darkness has the function of excluding the viewer."42

6. Giorgio Morandi, Large, Dark Still Life, 1934.

52 I Chapter Two By contrast, just as an example of objects as "necessary pretexts," here is the incredible luminosity of a late composition, Still Life with Five Objects (1956, fig. 7): they are there, immovable, silent, perfect in their materiality made of volume and light, yet mysterious, at the same revealing and concealing their essence. Perhaps a phenomenological analysis a la Merleau-Ponty could come close to Morandi's vision; or, better still, we could apply to the Bolognese painter Lyotard's words about Klee: "What Cezanne taught him is not a writing by geometric volumes, but the deconstruction of representation and the invention of a space of the invisible, the possible": these "objects" (figures-images) "attest that creation exceeds created nature" (p. 237); or again (and the multiplication of possibilities, of quotations, attests by itself to the inadequacy of the written word to render the visual image), one remembers Wallace Stevens's considerations:

7. Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Five Objects, 1956.

Ut Figura Poesis | 53 The point is that the poet does his job by virtue of an effort of the mind. In doing so, he is in rapport with the painter, who does his job, with respect to the problems of form and color, which confront him incessantly, not by inspiration, but by imagination and by a miraculous kind of reason that the imagination sometimes promotes. . . . These works were deliciae of the spirit as distinguished from delectationes of the senses and this was so because one found in them the labor of calculation, the appetite for perfections Finally, we should consider another type of variation, through which Morandi explores the nature of things: it is the different distances at which the viewer's eye is placed.

8. Giorgio Morandi, Various Objects on a Table, 1931.

54 J Chapter Two For instance, the Various Objects on a Table (1931, fig. 8) are seen from afar, and they "could be distant hillside towns seen from a plain," while in the round and oval etchings of the forties "Morandi forces us to see the objects incompletely, by stealth, as though we peer through a keyhole unto a private world" (see for instance Still Life in an Oval, circa 1942, fig. 9). 44 Let us turn now to a series of landscapes, beginning with the first of Morandi's graphic oeuvre, The Bridge on the Savena River at Bologna (1912, fig. 10). It may be less perfect than the other etchings we have seen so far, yet it already shows the search for the essential; it is a landscape without human figures, enclosed within the hard margins of the composition (the house on the left, the tree on the right, a strong diagonal emphasis). Deep and long straight lines (which are a prelude to the later network) effectively contrast the white surface of the road, the parapet, and the house walls. After indicating Vitale da Bologna and Cezanne among the "origins" of the early Morandi, Arcangeli comments that Morandi already "sees his own strong soli-

9. Giorgio Morandi, Still Life in an Oval, circa 1942.

Ut Figura Poesis | 55

10. Giorgio Morandi, The Bridge on the Savena River at Bologna, 1912.

tude even in this prosperous countryside near Bologna" (P- 25). T h e continuity of Morandi's project and his ceaseless exploration are shown by a later landscape, The White Road (1933, fig. 11). The composition is very similar to that of the early Bridge, because of the long, diagonal, white space of the road, yet the innovations are equally memorable: the white spaces, of both the road and the sky, predominate here and actually govern the light grey masses of the houses, trees, bushes, and rocks, and dictate the fine mesh of the network of lines. Everything conjures up "the blinding light of that countryside, which seems to send back the echo of restless cicadas."45 Throughout the numerous landscapes by Morandi we can trace the same syntagmatic choice of subject (Bologna and Grizzana, his "Mont SainteVictoire" 46 ), and, on the paradigmatic axis, the same basic

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11. Giorgio Morandi, The White Road, 1933. execution through variation: tonalities of light achieved through the interplay of absolutely white surfaces and darker ones of a thick or loose mesh (or of markedly or softly etched lines), and always a tremendous mastery of the compositional elements: angle, spatial groupings, perspective, balance. Four examples will suffice here: Landscape (House at Grizzana) and Landscape of Il Poggio (both 1927), Il Poggio in the evening (1927, fig. 12), and Il Poggio in the morning (1928, fig. 13). Based on the necessary pre-texts of his domestic objects and of familiar landscapes, the graphic language of Giorgio Morandi seems indeed to achieve a miraculous oscillation between the imaginary (perfection) and the real (representation). In its pictorial autonomy, this language conveys a cultural meaning, which Calvino called "stoic" and which we could also term antiromantic and antiheroic. This message is perhaps even more radical, in its subdued appearances, than that conveyed by the figurative and poetic topos of the minstrel or mountebank.

Ut Figura Poesis | 57

12. Giorgio Morandi, Il Poggio in the Evening, 1927. Although he was tempted by the proposals of futurism, cubism, and the metaphysical painting of Carra and De Chirico, quietly and stubbornly Morandi found his own way and established his own figurative code, which was unmistakable. 47 He drew on the accepted tradition (from Piero della Francesca to Vermeer, from Rembrandt to Cezanne) and posited his own "pure painting" which can be linked with, but must be distinguished from, the "abstract painting" of Mondrian.4 8 From the beginning, Morandi was the best representative of that "minority culture" or "minority civilization" indicated repeatedly by Arcangeli (also in connection with La Voce), which coincides with a particular stratum of Italian and European society, the petite bourgeoisie, the repository of values antithetical to fascism. In this context, we could even connect Morandi's belonging to the petite bourgeoisie, intended as a spiritual attitude, to Albert Camus's L'homme revoke, perhaps filtered through Giuseppe Raimondi, the Bolognese writer. But in the meantime it is important to emphasize, with Arcangeli, that Morandi, like Montale,

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13. Giorgio Morandi, Il Poggio in the Morning, 1928. could never have been a fascist, because there was in him another unshakable truth: that of a modest, ancient, civilized Italy, still capable sometimes of profound and serious things. He has not only sung "what we are not, what we do not want," he has not only avoided the human figure; but he has slowly come to affirm an ascertained, a human possession of the world and things. It is not much, but in it there is implicit the whole. That is why Morandi is a teacher of inner freedom as well as of civic behavior, (pp. 162-63)

Ut Figura Poesis | 59 In this extremely persuasive interpretation by Arcangeli, then, Morandi, as a contemplative petit bourgeois, became the masterly painter and engraver of still lifes and landscapes; in so doing he made the radius of vision and that of conscience coincide, and achieved a difficult equilibrium between "the autonomy of art and the humanness of art" (pp. 288 and 305), or, again, between the imaginary and the real. One last image from his etchings seems appropriate to link him with Montale: The Garden at Fondazza Street (1924, fig. 14). The garden, the orchard is the thematic image that recurs hauntingly throughout Ossi.

3."Meriggiare pallido e assorto" Let us turn, then, to Montale's poetry. My purpose is to emphasize the homologies to be found between certain po-

14. Giorgio Morandi, The Garden at Fondazza Street, 1924.

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ems of Ossi di seppia and Morandi's etchings. Differences exist, of course: for instance, in the critical terminology used to describe visual arts there is no term yet comparable to poetic "voice"; 4 9 the time of Montale's poetry is indeed unique and "unforgettable";5° and more particularly, the development of Montale from the stoicism of Ossi to the skepticism of Quaderno di quattro anni or Altri versi does not parallel a similar development in Morandi. But homolo­ gies do seem to be more interesting and important than differences. We might begin by stating that Montale's thematic and semantic diminutio antiaulica is the poetic homologue of Morandi's "humble genre" of etching still lifes and land­ scapes. T h e first stanza of "I limoni" is quite an appropri­ ate case in point: Ascoltami, i poeti laureati si muovono soltanto fra Ie piante dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri ο acanti. Ιο, per me, amo Ie strade che riescono agli erbosi fossi dove in pozzanghere mezzo seccate agguantano i ragazzi qualche sparuta anguilla: Ie viuzze che seguono i ciglioni, discendono tra i ciuffi delle canne 51 e mettono negli orti, tra gli alberi dei limoni. Listen to me, the poets laureate move only among plants with little—used names: boxwood, Cyprus, or acanthus. As for me, I love the roads that end u p in grassy ditches where in half-dried puddles boys grab some meager eel: the little lanes which follow the ridges, slope down among the tufts of cannas and lead into orchards, amidst the lemon trees. Not only are the lemon trees juxtaposed with acanthus and other gloriously poetic vegetation, but all the images

Ut Figura Poesis | 61 of the stanza indicate the anti-Petrarchan and anti-Dannunzian stance of Montale, from the grassy ditches to the little lanes, from the half-dried puddles to the meager eel, from the tufts of cannas to the orchards. We should not take Montale's statement blindly: his poetry is aho aulic, it does acknowledge and incorporate tradition into his own original voice (see "Io, per me," at the center of the stanza). 52 But the statement is important, nonetheless. As a matter of practical poetics, already it indicates the thematic choice and the lexical recurrence in Ossi of humble objects. Moreover, the sememes denoting objects are tied together in the texture of the poem by typically Montalean procedures, such as internal rhyme (bossi-fossi) and assonance (pozzanghere-mezzo-ragazzi-viuzze-ciuffi), alongside the canonical rhyme (ciglioni-limoni). T h e very title of the poetic collection, Ossi di seppia, cuttlefish bones, refers to an inconspicuous object, but "this God-forsaken thing," as Cambon puts it, "loses its insignificance to become (as does the pebble) a symbol of essentialness." 53 Especially relevant in this connection are the images that appear in two comparisons—and it should be remembered that comparisons or similes are the simplest form of metaphor, that is, the linguistic device that transposes the imaginary into the verbal, the figural into the discursive. The first image is in "Mediterraneo": Avrei voluto sentirmi scabro ed essenziale siccome i ciottoli che tu volvi, mangiati dalla salsedine; I would have wanted to feel rough and essential like the pebbles you roll, gnawed by brackishness; The second is in "Riviere": Oh allora sballottati come l'osso di seppia dalle ondate svanire a poco a poco.

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Oh then tossed like the cuttlefish bone by the waves to vanish little by little. "Like the pebbles," "like the cuttlefish bone": these two similes, these two images can be taken as guiding points for the many objects with a similar function to be found throughout Ossi di seppia, true and actual still lifes in poetry. muro d'orto (orchard wall), fuscello teso dal muro (twig stretching from the wall), l'agave sullo scoglio (the agave on the rock), un croco perduto in mezzo a un polveroso prato (a crocus lost in the middle of a dusty meadow), pochi stocchi d'erbaspada (a few stalks of spiky grass), casa sul mare (house by the sea), Ie petraie d'un greto (the stones of a river bed), il girasole col suo volto giallino (the sunflower with its light-yellow face), una reliquia di vita (a relic of life), la foglia riarsa (the parched leaf), la statua nella sonnolenza I del meriggio (the statue in the drowsiness I of noonday), la carrucola del pozzo (the pulley of the well),

Ut Figura Poesis | 63

sugheri alghe asterie (corks seaweeds starfish), i ciuffi delle aride canne (the tufts of arid cannas), l'erba grigia I nelle corti scurite, tra Ie case (the grey grass I in darkened courtyards, amid houses), una statua dell'Estate I fatta camusa da lapidazioni (a statue of Summer / made snub by stonings), strada portico I mura specchi (street arcade I walls mirrors), rami cedui (coppiced branches), reti stinte (discolored nets) One could continue, but the given examples should suffice. As a commentary to this brief and incomplete list, let me quote Contini's considerations on the "descriptive" and "assertive" phases of Ossi di seppia: " 'Love' for things . . . is substituted for by a harsh statement of possession, through the insistence on the presence, on the essence of objects. . . . Underlying the whole of Montale's poetry there is a dramatic struggle of the poet with objects, almost in order to find a justification for seeing."5* We immediately notice the intimate consonance of these remarks by Contini with Arcangeli's statement, previously quoted, that Morandi "has slowly come to affirm an ascertained, a human possession of the world and things": indeed, like the painter, the poet needs to find "a justification for seeing." That is why the many objects present in Ossi di seppia are an essential part of Montale's poetic texture. They are the figural that bursts into the discourse, the "necessary pretexts" for his poetry. These same objects surround, accompany, or simply constitute one of the three major themes of his early book, which the author himself described as "landscape, love,

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and evasion."55 Clearly, landscape in the present context is not only a major theme, but also a formal aspect which re­ lates Montale to Morandi most significantly. In fact, both objects and landscape, by their very presence in the poetic text, constitute a redimensioning of the human figure: the voice of the poet acquires its value only through his rela­ tionship with external reality, which can only be perceived through its appearances, its manifestations. Contingency invites inquiry into essence. In this sense objects and land­ scapes are much more than "objective correlatives" of the poet's inner situation. T h e preeminence of the Ligurian landscape, then, im­ plies a certain disappearance of the human figure, al­ though this landscape remains a function of the human (as the other two themes of love and evasion clearly indicate), exactly as is the case in Morandi's etchings of the Bolognese countryside. Nowhere in Ossi di seppia is this land­ scape or still-life function more apparent than in "Meriggiare pallido e assorto": Meriggiare pallido e assorto presso un rovente muro d'orto, ascoltare tra i pruni e gli sterpi schiocchi di merli, frusci di serpi. Nelle crepe del suolo ο su la veccia spiar Ie file di rosse formiche ch'ora si rompono ed ora s'intrecciano a sommo di minuscole biche. Osservare tra frondi il palpitare lontano di scaglie di mare mentre si levano tremuli scricchi di cicale dai calvi picchi. E andando nel sole che abbaglia sentire con triste meraviglia com'e tutta la vita e il suo travaglio in questo seguitare una muraglia che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia.

Ut Figura Poesis | 65

To rest at noon pale and absorbed near a scorching orchard wall, to listen amid bush and brake to cracks of blackbirds, rustle of snakes. In the soil cracks or on the vetch to watch the lines of red ants now breaking and now intertwining on top of tiny stacks. To observe through foliage the distant palpitating of sea scales while there rise quivering creaks of cicadas from barren peaks. And walking in the dazzling sun to feel with sad astonishment how all of life and its travail is in this following a wall which has on top jagged shards of bottle. T h e first remark to be made about this poem concerns the semantic and the syntactic levels of the very first word, "meriggiare," posited "in a precarious balance between the status of verb and noun, set in a sentence apparently lacking a grammatical subject."56 In fact, "meriggiare" may mean "noontimeness" or "to rest at noon," and is therefore another perfect example of Bloomfield's syntactic ambiguity, already noted in "Corno inglese," while at yet another level it is a proof of what Debenedetti calls "the nonobligatoriness of signifieds" in "hermetic" poetry.s? As a signifier, then, "meriggiare" in any case does exclude a grammatical subject and, if we take it as a verb, it is the first in a series of other infinitive tenses, plus a gerund (andando), all of which "refer to human activities from which Man himself has been banished. They impose the act of seeing without a see-er, the act of listening without a pair of ears, of spying without an inquisitive mind to do the spying" :58 meriggiare, ascoltar, spiar, osservare, sentire, seguitare. Four of these infinitives are linked together also

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by internal rhyme, and one (spiar) by quasi-rhyme; and they are reinforced by another verb-noun (palpitare), which is a human activity referred to sea scales, the object of human vision. Not only thematically, but formally as well, this poem successfully removes the human figure from the scene and achieves the closest possible homology between poetic "voice" and pictorial "viewpoint." This homology is further emphasized by other formal qualities of the text: just as in Morandi the Apenninian slopes, roads, and houses are formalized into compositions with tonalities of light (chiaroscuro, mesh, white surfaces, lines), so the Ligurian sea and landscape is transformed by Montale into "a series of phonetic clashes dominated by the close interaction of plosive and guttural consonants"^ pruni, sterpi, schiocchi, serpi, scricchi, also connected with labials: "tremuli scricchi I di cicale dai calvi picchi." On the lexical-semantic level, these phonetic clashes should be considered within the closely knit system of rhyme and assonance patterns: sterpi-serpi, schiocchi-scricchi-picchi, or later on, even more impressively, the sequence abbagliameraviglia-travaglio-muraglia-bottiglia. Nicolas Perella notes that the "trigrammatic gli" appears "almost in a vertical column," the visual image of the wall—"muragfta"— into which it is inserted. 6 " These patterns have little to do with an actual representation of the landscape itself; they are part of its poetical transcoding, which is valuable as such because of its sonorous texture, its phonetic form. It is interesting to note that in this poetic landscape there is a criss-crossing, almost a mesh, of geometric planes: the horizontal (lines of ants, distant sea scales, walking, following a wall) and the vertical (stacks, peaks, dazzling sun, top of the wall) clearly constitute vectors which guide the reader's perception. But if such a geometry implies a geometer, it is not exactly a pictorial geometry, because it is governed by a peculiar perspective which allows the conjunction of the minutest detail (the red ants) with the vast horizon (the distant palpitating of sea scales) within the same composition—while for a painter (for ex-

Ut Figura Poesis | 67

ample, Morandi) the distance of the object to be contemplated (to be "spied" on) may be now close, now far, but only in different compositions. Furthermore, in order to underline the specificity of poetry, we should think of the synesthetic copresence of sight and sound. A possible key to an understanding of such a peculiar perspective is the syntax of the poem, in which conjunctions abound: presso (near), tra (amid), nelle (in the), su (on), a sommo di (on top of), tra (through), mentre (while), dai (from), con (with), in cima (on top). Durand notes that in the "mystic structure of the imaginary" there is a type of expression that tends to privilege precisely such prepositions, which try to establish some (metonymic) link between logically disparate objects. This type of expression belongs to the same "nocturnal regimen of the imaginary" already pointed out with reference to Morandi's repetition and variation, and it reinforces the comparison between the poet and the painter at a very basic, anthropological level, which even precedes their homology at the level of culture. 61 T h e last stanza of the poem articulates a rational discourse from the series of visual and auditive perceptions transcribed so far, yet it is very significant indeed that such a rational discourse is introduced by the verb "sentire" (to feel) and culminates in a metaphor (living a life as following a wall). This metaphor means first of all that in expressing and communicating his experience of the world Montale uses the Ligurian landscape as a necessary pretext for a poetic discourse which is halfway between the real and the imaginary, between and betwixt, "on the edge." 62 But we should recall Jakobson's assertion that in poetry "any metonymy is slightly metaphorical and any metaphor has a metonymical tint"; we should also remember Bloomfield's idea that "poetry is a kind of syntactization of referential words. They become more metonymic and less metaphorical," so that "poetry has a syntactic as well as a semantic density."6s Now we can see that this last Montalean metaphor is no exception to the rules of the

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two linguists. Perhaps Montale (like Morandi) devises series of metonymies from which he hopes a metaphor might be precipitated: we could speak of a "diegetic metaphor" (as Genette does for Proust) ,64 to convey the sense in which the Montalean metaphor derives from the spatiotemporal context of the poem. Metaphor seems to appear as a kind of virtual, perfect point at which Montale aims, but which he does not claim he quite reaches. "The absolute expression," he says later, in the "imaginary interview" discussed in the first chapter, "remained an unreachable limit."6s In his etchings, Morandi, too, uses an essentially metonymic process, and he too does not claim he has reached a perfection he continues to seek through his constant repetition and variation. In the end, it has been possible to trace a trajectory in both Montale and Morandi that defines their respective works of art in terms of the imaginary and the discursive, and the definition implies both origin in the anthropological imaginary and expression through cultural codes and meanings, which were in fact properly received by generations of Italians, as is shown by Calvino's and Arcangeli's statements quoted earlier in this chapter. In particular, the metaphor-metonymy in the last stanza of "Meriggiare pallido e assorto" seems the most adequate and revealing conclusion for my analysis; and I might add, with all due irony and self-irony, that there is perhaps a sort of poetic (or should I say pictorial?) justice in the final image of the poem, which unites Montale's "wall" with Morandi's "bottle," the two "real" objects that are in turn the metaphorsmetonymies of the two artists' unending pursuit of perfection.

3

Strategies of the Antihero

Dove avete lasciato il vecchio fuoco, delizia d'altri bardi? Tarde e fioche Ie corde, il vostro suono e forzato, Ie note so no poche! WILLIAM BLAKE, Aile Muse, Italian translation by Eugenio Montale

Poetry and Prose Starting from an analysis of the element of sound in the early poetry of Eugenio Montale (especially in "Como inglese"), I have proceeded with an examination of its visual aspect (particularly in "Meriggiare pallido e assorto"). To be more exact, from a comparison between poetry's phonic level and the dissonance of Debussy'S "new music" I have arrived at a homology between the figurative level of Montale's poetic lexicon and Morandi's etching language. Actually, such an analysis presupposes a copresence of levels, whose vertical stratification (the audible and the visual coexist both in "Corno inglese" and "Meriggiare") is not limited to the elements studied so far. It includes a third one, equally fundamental, and in fact impossible to put aside even if it was somewhat sacrificed. I am referring to the discursive (or ideologic) element. Mon69

70 I Chapter Three tale himself, incidentally, used to say that "the compromise between sound and meaning does not allow for partial solutions favoring the one or the other element." 1 This element includes all the references to dissonance as a disharmony between self and world, and to the insistence on poetic objects rather than on the human figure, references that have a very precise thematic, symbolic, and cultural meaning: antiheroism as a choice of life, as a vision of the world. This ideologic element, this discursive level should then be given a greater attention than that provided so far. We might start with some general considerations on literary phenomenology: the intertextual homology between lyric poetry and narrative prose seems to have been too often sacrificed to the exigencies of rational clarity and genre classification inherent in historicist discourse. Not by chance Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, while recalling the "two seemingly contrasting theses" by Bakhtin on the "plasticity" of the novel and by Juri Tynianov on the "fluidity" of lyric poetry, advocates a two-pronged critical research. On the one hand, he proposes an analysis of "the decay of traditional forms of verse narration, in which Don Juan, Pan Tadeusz and above all Eugene Onegin are indeed the exceptions confirming the rule" (and we might certainly add Attilio Bertolucci's work). On the other, he suggests an examination of the various ways in which lyric poetry "has absorbed narrative and more generally prosaic requirements and modalities, with the related crises and formal adjustments." For his part, Mengaldo emphasizes the "narrativity" of Montale's poetry and notices that particularly in Le occasioni there is an "even more refined narrative pagination of existential myths. Montale builds it by inserting into the strictures of his lyric form precisely the suggestions of the best contemporary novelists (Proust, Svevo, the British) beside those of his favorite verse narrators like Browning." 2 Another critic, Romano Luperini, also underscores the "decidedly narrative rather than musical slant" of the

Strategies of the Antihero | 71 "Mediterraneo" suite in Ossi di seppia. This slant includes "links connecting the various movements," "an existential balance sheet which presupposes a development, a temporal arc," "a subject positing himself as character . . . (almost an nth portrait of the artist as a young man)," and a final "meaning as a conclusion of his search for truth, for a sense of his life." Therefore, for Luperini "Mediterraneo" is a "fundamental chapter" in that "true novel of identity which is Ossi di seppia."3 I wish to broaden and deepen both Mengaldo's and Luperini's remarks, and I wish to do so both in the direction of the history of the novel and in that of lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Montale, of course. At the outset it should be remembered that in Bakhtin's conception the novel is the hegemonic genre of modernity, the one which, by continuously questioning itself and by adhering to a changing reality, promotes the "novelization of literature"; in doing so it frees the other literary genres from their sclerotic conventions: "The novelization of other genres does not imply their subjection to an alien generic canon [since 'the novel, after all, has no canon of its own']; on the contrary, novelization implies their liberation from all that serves as a brake on their unique development, from all that would change them along with the novel into some sort of stylization of forms that have outlived themselves." 4 Furthermore, there are three areas in which the novel is opposed to the epic and which appear to be extremely relevant for lyric poetry as well: its "multilinguistic awareness" (polyphony, dialogic imagination, heteroglossia); its temporal and cognitive organization, centered on its "direct contact" with today's "developing reality"; and especially its way of constructing characters: The destruction of epic distance and the transferral of the image of an individual from the distanced plane to the zone of contact with the inconclusive events of the

72 I Chapter Three present (and consequently of the future) result in a radical re-structuring of the image of the individual in the novel—and consequently in all literature. Folklore and popular-comic sources for the novel played a huge role in this process. Its first and essential step was the comic familiarization of the image of man. Laughter destroyed epic distance; it began to investigate man freely and familiarly; to turn him inside out, expose the disparity between his surface and his center, between his potential and his reality. A dynamic authenticity was introduced into the image of man, dynamics of inconsistency and tension between various factors of this image; man ceased to coincide with himself, and consequently men ceased to be exhausted entirely by the plots that contain them. Bakhtin's last point deserves further consideration, especially because he stresses the role of popular masks (such as Pulcinella or Harlequin) in the formation of the novel out of folklore, and the functions of the rogue, clown, and fool in the development of a genre in which, paradigmatically, the epic hero "turns into a jester." In fact, in literary history, at least as far as the West is concerned, the figure of the hero has undergone a steady decline. Instead of the classic hero of the Greeks it has been possible to speak of modern and contemporary heroes who are "mediocre" or "middling" (Lukacs), "passive" (Garber), "unheroic" (Giraud), "intellectual" or "impossible" (Brombert), "artistic" (Blackmur), "vanishing" (OTaolain);5 or, again, the modern hero has been defined as "comic" (Torrance), "absurd" (Galloway), "limping" (Hays), and "a failure" (Schilling).6 Even Montale noticed, following Mario Praz, that "the everyday hero, the bourgeois hero is born" in the nineteenth-century novel, 7 while Luigi Pirandello peremptorily remarks, in his fundamental essay on L'umorismo (Humor): "The humorist does not recognize heroes; or better, he lets others represent heroes; for his part, he knows what a leg-

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end is and how it is formed, what history is and how it is formed: they are all compositions, more or less ideal compositions, which he enjoys taking to pieces. And one cannot say it is a pleasant amusement." In fact Pirandello must underscore "those unbecoming, loose, whimsical elements, all those digressions that are noticeable in a humoristic work, in contrast with the orderly mechanism, the composition of the work of art in general." With a significant choice, he hearkens back to the authority of Lawrence Sterne and concludes: T h e ordinary artist pays attention only to the body; the humorist pays attention to the body and the shadow, and sometimes more to the shadow than to the body; he notes all of this shadow's tricks, how it becomes now elongated, now large, almost as if it made grimaces to the body, which in the meantime does not take them into consideration and does not care about them. In medieval representations of the devil we find a scholar who, in order to mock him, makes him catch his own shadow on the wall. He who represented this devil was certainly not a humorist. A humorist knows very well how much a shadow is worth: Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl is a perfect example. 8 I believe it is unnecessary to emphasize how valuable the above remarks are for understanding the mechanisms and meanings of Pirandello's oeuvre, a true milestone in contemporary theatre and fiction. It seems more useful, instead, to follow the reference to Peter Schlemihl (which, incidentally, was known to Montale as well).9 Its protagonist, who sells his shadow to the devil and then expiates his guilt throughout his life, is posited as a kind of anti-Faust and is perhaps the best known of a whole series of similar figures, which are a specifically Jewish contribution to Western art. Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt have emphasized the role of the Jewish comic in Western culture and fiction, especially through insistence on the body and on bodily

74 J Chapter Three functions, even "low" ones (and here it is necessary to recall the homologous categories of the "carnivalesque" and the "lower bodily stratum" put forth by Bakhtin in his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky), not to mention the antiheroism of the rabbinic tradition. 10 Heine's and Chamisso's Schlemihl is a "pariah" in the social world but he is also a "lord of dreams" (the poet protected by Apollo), and the same phenomenon occurs, even in a more aggressive manner, in Kafka and his doubles—from K. to Gregor Samsa, from Joseph to the hunger artist, men of good will who might be any one and each of us. But the climax of the Jewish tradition, in this sense, according to Arendt, is Charlie Chaplin, who, although not himself Jewish, succeeded in representing the typically Jewish figure of the harassed suspect: To be sure, he too is a schlemihl, but not of the old visionary type, not a secret fairy prince, a protege of Phoebus Apollo. Chaplin's world is of the earth earthy, grotesquely caricatured if you will, but nevertheless hard and real. It is a world from which neither nature nor art can provide escape and against whose slings and arrows the only armor is one's own wits or the kindness and humanity of casual acquaintances. . . . Chaplin's own childhood had taught him two things. On the one hand, it had taught him the traditional Jewish fear of the "cop"—that seeming incarnation of a hostile world; but ori the other, it had taught him the time-honored Jewish truth that, other things being equal, the human ingenuity of a David can sometimes outmatch the animal strength of a Goliath. . . . Chaplin's suspect is linked to Heine's schlemihl by the common element of innocence . . . , an expression of the dangerous incompatibility of general laws with individual misdeeds. Although in itself tragic, this incompatibility reveals its comic aspects in the case of the suspect, where it becomes patent. There is obviously

Strategies of the Antihero | 75 no connection at all between what Chaplin does or does not do and the punishment which overtakes him. Because he is suspect, he is called upon to bear the brunt of much that he has not done. Yet. . . he is able to get away with a great deal. Out of this ambivalent situation springs an attitude both of fear and of impudence, . . . the kind so familiar to generations of Jews, the effrontery of the poor "little Yid." . . . It was in this "little Yid," poor in worldly goods but rich in human experience, that the little man of all peoples most clearly discerned his own image. 11 Therefore it is not by chance that the greatest Italian writer of Jewish origin, before choosing his definitive pseudonym, played with assonances and meanings in order to pass from his family name, Schmitz, through Schlemihl, to Samigli, his first literary screen. 12 And it is certainly not by chance that "Schlemihhsm" runs, in more or less allusive, masked, and indirect ways, throughout his entire oeuvre. Here I wish to present a minimal example of such Schlemihhsm. It is an extremely pertinent piece, because it concerns precisely the chain fear-suspicion-innocence as it is experienced by Zeno Cosini, Italo Svevo's Schlemihl: We had started without letters of introduction, and many of the strangers we found ourselves among seemed to me hostile. It was an absurd fear, but I could not get over it. I might have been attacked, insulted or, what was worse, maligned, and who would have defended me? This fear became a positive panic, though fortunately no one, not even Augusta, found out about it. I was in the habit of buying almost every paper that was offered me in the street. One day when I was standing in front of a newsvendor's bench, it occurred to me that he might easily take a dislike to me and have me arrested as a thief, because although I had only bought one paper from him I had a number

76 I Chapter Three under my arm still unopened, which I had bought from other newspaper boys. I hurried away, followed by Augusta, to whom I gave no reason for my sudden haste. 1S A similar situation, involving fear-suspicion-innocence, is portrayed by another great writer of Jewish origin, Saul Bellow: when Professor Herzog, the protagonist of the eponymous novel, is stopped in his car by a policeman, he feels that his "immunity" is over. But to return to Italian literature, and to a related theme, the critic Giacomo Debenedetti deals with Pirandello (and Federigo Tozzi) to illustrate what he calls "the victorious invasion of the ugly ones": "a repertoire of representatives of the squalid, the unpleasant, the sullen, the dreary, the muddle-headed, the repulsive"; he explains the origin of such a physiognomic or iconographic deformation with Cezanne and expressionism. And, in tracing the latest developments of the French nouveau roman, he also proposes a collection of "anticharacters" with their "predicates" and "ways of being" which include isolation, extravagant dialogues, deprived and atonic existence, incommunicability, insignificance, and inauthenticity. 14 If we want to sum up the decline of the hero in one paradigmatic example, we have passed from Odysseus, Homer's Greek and epic hero, to Ulysses, Joyce's novelistic hero from Dublin who (not by chance) follows A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which in turn is the forerunner of a whole series of deformations on the same theme, the most significant of which, in this context, is perhaps the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas (1941). It seems therefore preferable to do away entirely with the term "hero" and to use its opposite, "antihero," as Dostoevsky did, paradigmatically, for his "man from the underground" who gathers within himself precisely and "deliberately all the characteristics of the antihero": resentment, contemplative attitude, abjection, sense of

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degradation to an insect or a mouse (almost a genetic metaphor of Kafka's Gregor Samsa), sense of guilt, neurosis, inertia, revolt, the grotesque. . . . And all of these negative characteristics of the antihero are literally (for the first time, I believe) juxtaposed to those of "the hero of the novel"; whereby, if we take into account the date of Dostoevsky's text, 1864, we cannot disagree with Trilling who called the man from the underground "the eponymous ancestor of a now numerous tribe."^ The term "antihero," then, from the underground of a Russian and universal soul, contains a reference to a human and literary past perhaps lost forever, as well as to a problematic present, to "this age of unadaptability, run through by philosophies of anguish, an age which has arrived at the point of fetishizing its own malaise in that monstrous idol which is the atom bomb, of conceiving projects for the end of the world." 16 Could we use a term like "strategy" in connection with "antihero"? At first sight, such a metaphoric use might seem a paradox, a contradiction in terms, if not an oxymoron—at least to the extent to which the antihero is the exact opposite of the hero, who is the traditional referent for such a soldierly concept as strategy. One needs only to think of Napoleon, hero and strategist par excellence, the model for a whole generation of romantic poets as well as neoclassical artists, and the focus of the philosophic debate in Hegel (philosophy versus history, or word versus power). However, such a model is no longer valuable for contemporary writers, who subject it to a true diminutio antiaulica, as does Svevo for example in Confessions of Zeno, with his ironic couplings of life and career and history and nature, which are placed, moreover, at the beginning of a chapter devoted to the antiheroic topic of "The Story of My Marriage": In the minds of middle-class young men life is associated with a career, and in early youth that career is

78 I Chapter Three usually Napoleon's. They do not of course necessarily dream of becoming Emperor, because it is possible to be like Napoleon while remaining far, far below him. Similarly, the most intense life is summarized in the most rudimentary of sounds, that of a sea-wave, which from the moment it is born until it expires is in a state of continual change. I too, like Napoleon and like the wave, could at any rate look forward to a recurring state of birth and dissolution. 17 It seems then that the metaphor used in the title of this chapter is necessary. When applied to the hero, "strategy" has an active, aggressive connotation; when applied to the antihero, it has a passive, self-defensive, self-ironic quality which, by itself, might suffice to characterize a historical shift manifested and documented particularly in and by the contemporary novel—although the simple mention of such works as Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik (also taken up by Bertold Brecht), Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, or Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (just to remain within a very specific semantic area) would suffice to enlarge the scope of the problem greatly. In any case strategy points to the environment, not only to the subject, and this environment is definitely hostile, if not cruel and violent. If he wants to survive, the antihero must have a strategy of his own; he must somehow use the weapons provided by the environment for his own ends. Suffice it to think of the picaro, who is both active and passive, a fundamental figure in the development of the novel precisely in the sense indicated by Bakhtin, in that the picaro is strictly related to the notions of travel and transgression. Besides, the antihero, too, contains within himself certain elements of violence that are not too far removed from the notion and the practice of strategy (for instance it has been possible to talk about libertine or sadomasochistic strategies). But above all, since the antihero, exactly like the hero, is

Strategies of the Antihero | 79 simply a character, he cannot be anything other than part of the "strategy" of the author—a point that must be always kept in mind, especially in the case of the contemporary novel and its literary as well as cognitive contributions. Benjamin says that the critic is a strategist in the literary struggle: so is the author, obviously; and this struggle involves the reader, too, with his active perceptions and responses. If the environment is hostile and violent, the subject finds himself in a rapport of disharmony with it, a rapport for which contemporary sociology and literary criticism have a common, although not always precise, definition: alienation. I realize that to use the term "alienation" might cause some immediate reaction of annoyance or rejection, because this term has been perhaps excessively used and might give an impression of deja vu. But putting the finger on the wound can be healthy. So, the alienated man can be considered the twentieth-century man par excellence, and as such he plays a central role in literature: he becomes the antihero, he is a member of an indeed numerous tribe. He is now ironic as in Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities; now intellectually rebellious, as in Sartre's Nausea; now indifferent, as in Moravia's Time of Indifference or in Camus' The Stranger; now angry, as in Dublin's Berlin Alexanderplatz (later brought to grotesque and resounding results by Grass' The Tin Drum); now deliberately abject, as in Celine's Voyage to the End of Night; now extremely learned and self-destructive, as in Canetti's Auto da Fe; now innocent and picaro at the same time, as in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye or in Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March; now tormented, as in Borgese's Rube or in Gadda's Acquainted with Grief; now not even existing, as for instance Agilulfo and Qfwfq in two books by Calvino, The Non-existent Knight and Cosmicomics—not to mention many other variations on the theme. Perhaps the roots of contemporary alienation are to be traced (if one does not want to go back to Christian theology or Roman law) in the romantic attitude of the "fallen

80 I Chapter Three angel" in a debased, unworthy world, an attitude that found its philosophical expression in Hegel's phenomenology and a recent formulation in Morse Peckham's notion of "negative romanticism." 18 It is mainly psychological and ontological. But there is little doubt that the contemporary meaning of alienation derives directly from Marx and his description of capitalist society, where all human relations, within a class or between classes, become dehumanized, and the notions of reification and fetishism of commodities acquire a predominant role (in this connection, Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness of 1923 is particularly eloquent).^ These notions become even more meaningful, more universal if possible, in Georg Simmel's sociological and philosophical conception: he considers them the inevitable result of human culture, as obeying a logic that is no longer that of the original spirit or subject but is inherent, intrinsically necessary to the cultural phenomenon itself: this is "the tragedy of culture," which cannot but alienate the citified, technological, modern man from his naturalness. 20 Only art is somewhat capable of achieving all the potentialities of the individual, but (here Simmel inspired Wilhelm Worringer directly) art reflects the sociocultural conditions from which it is born: expressions of naturalistic art correspond to periods of harmony between man and the cosmos, and expressions of abstract art correspond to periods of disharmony. 21 Such a distinction remains valid for contemporary art and literature, and its precise critical reflection can be seen in Joseph Frank's The Widening Gyre.2* Alienation in the Marxian sense should be juxtaposed to anomie, the concept developed by Durkheim, the positivists, and the behaviorists, for whom man is incapable of adapting himself to the changing conditions of society and should be so adapted by society itself, through "social engineering" or even, today, through psychoanalysis (obviously, I am not speaking of forced consent in totalitarian societies). Both Marxian alienation and anomie are very

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important for understanding the contemporary existential situation: 23 in fact they are those "abstractions" with which sociology deals in outlining "the dilemmas of modernity" and in criticizing its potentially negative developments. 24 In such a context, there is no doubt that alienation in its various forms has enormous relevance for contemporary literature: it is, in fact, a "prime theme" as well as an underlying structure. But, as an English Marxist critic suggests, there is also another kind of alienation (Verfremdung): it is "a philosophy and technique of literature, particularly drama, primarily associated with Brecht and involving detachment, non empathy and disillusion. Art recognizing itself as art. Alienated art." 25 I think it legitimate to relate this artistic alienation to the "estrangement" (ostranenje) of the Russian formalist school: the two notions certainly do not coincide entirely, but they are undoubtedly similar and complementary; both are effective, not to say indispensable, for understanding contemporary culture. Moreover, both alienation and estrangement can and perhaps should be connected, on a higher level, to forms of "self-irony of art," through which the artist can "transcend his condition [of a limited man in the world] not in reality, but intellectually and fantastically."26 This selfirony goes back to romanticism, and has been recognized and studied in its diversified manifestations and connections especially in lyric poetry, where it plays a major role. I shall only quote a comment by Ezio Raimondi on Baudelaire, as particularly relevant to my own critical stance: "The fall, the alienation of the homo duplex is transferred onto nature; and through alienation, the theatricality of the doubling of the self is reproduced, sanctioning the irony of the mask, the need for the artificial, the pleasure of disguise, the exasperated taste for convention." a ? I shall also, and not by chance, quote a remark by Paul De Man, again on Baudelaire: "Irony is unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the point of madness. Sanity can exist only because we are willing to function within the conventions of duplicity

82 I Chapter Three and dissimulation, just as social language dissimulates the inherent violence of the actual relationships between human beings. Once this mask is shown to be a mask, the authentic being underneath appears necessarily as on the verge of madness." 28 If Baudelaire appears, then, more than ever, to be the poet and essayist of modernity (as Montale would say), it is necessary to focus our attention on contemporary Italian literature, where the major thrust toward a representation of the theme of alienation and at the same time toward an overcoming of it (precisely through the strategies of the antihero) has occurred mainly at the beginning of this century, in the twenties. More specifically, there was a brief but intense period, during which three major works in both the novel and poetry appeared: Italo Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno, 1923), Luigi Pirandello's Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, none, and a hundred thousand, 1925), and Eugenio Montale's Ossi di seppia (1925; the second edition in 1928 included "Arsenio," written in 1926-27). In highlighting these works, I follow a suggestion by Debenedetti: "If the character 'man' of the modern novel is a stranger, he also shadows the character of the hermetic poet, his attitudes and behavior." 29 I also follow, and expand, an idea by Montale himself, who introduced Svevo's Zeno by repeatedly emphasizing his qualities as a "European man."3° A few diachronic considerations are in order before proceeding to the synchronic analysis of these works. With La coscienza di Zeno Svevo concluded his oeuvre, begun in 1892 with Una vita (A life) and continued in 1898 with Senilita (As a man grows older). It marked a significant turning point in the Italian novel—doubly significant, in fact, because it represented a new and powerful view of the world after the ones established mainly by Alessandro Manzoni and Giovanni Verga in the nineteenth century (thus being juxtaposed to D'Annunzio's), and because, given precisely its novelty and power, it introduced modernism in Italian literature in a manner comparable to

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what Joyce did for the English and Proust for the French.» 1 It might be appropriately remembered that Svevo's fame was first of all European rather than Italian, thanks to Joyce's enthusiastic support, which led to the presentation of Svevo by Valery Larbaud and Benjamin Cremieux in France, while Montale (acting on a suggestion by Bobi Bazlen) introduced the Triestine writer to Italian readers in early 1925. The "dialogic" relation between Svevo and Montale was established at that time, and it is not the least in the complex network of European cultural references outlined so far, and a truly meaningful one for the topic under examination. In fact, Svevo used to exhort Montale to abandon poetry and take up "the more reasonable way of expressing himself," that is, prose! 32 In that same year, 1925, Pirandello's Uno, nessuno e centomila represented the culmination of his creative activity both as novelist and as playwright: it is the last novel he wrote, after working on it sparingly for more than a dozen years and developing some of its themes and ideas in the theatre, notably in the two masterpieces Set personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six characters in search of an author) and Enrico IV (Henry IV) of 1922. It brings to extreme consequences the existential intuitions of Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904) and the intentions about a poetics of "L'umorismo" of 1908-1920; it foreshadows the further, irrationalistic developments of his latest plays; it is, in short, a summa of Pirandello's revolutionary contribution to contemporary literature, both in the theatre (an almost obvious assertion is that Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco, and other playwrights would have been impossible without him), and in the novel (his accomplishments here were for a rather long time obfuscated by his extraordinary success on the stage, but are now increasingly recognized as fundamental ones, along with Svevo's—and Gadda's).33 Montale's Ossi di seppia plays an equally fundamental role in the history of its author, of Italian poetry, and of contemporary poetry in general. It is the first book pub-

84 I Chapter Three lished by the young poet, and it establishes the basis for his subsequent works, notably Le occasioni (The occasions, 1939) and La bufera e altro (The storm and other poems, 1957), but also Satura (1971), Diario del ' 7 / e del '72, Quaderno di quattro anni (Notebook for four years), and Altri versi (Other lines), all collected now in the critical edition L'opera in versi. Ossi di seppia breaks with the predominant Petrarchan and Dannunzian tradition of Italian poetry, and powerfully inserts the problems and the language of conscience and analytical reason into an area where sentiments or irrationality dominated—even in the poetry of the other two great figureheads, Umberto Saba and Giuseppe Ungaretti. It had an enormous impact on whole generations of readers, and can be—actually has been— linked in many respects with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, that other milestone of contemporary poetry. In other words, Ossi di seppia is a fundamental work not only for what it is and says, but for how it has been historically received and interpreted (for instance, its "stoicism" according to Calvino and Arcangeli, discussed in the previous chapter), and for the cultural model it expressed and transmitted. Svevo, Pirandello, and Montale are particularly representative of a major development in Italian literature in the twenties, the period when, according to Debenedetti, contemporaneity begins: 34 they are the poets of the modern conscience. As such, their works are indispensable for understanding contemporary alienation through their respective antiheroes. Zeno, Moscarda, and Arsenio are three fundamental specimens of what Caute calls "alienated art": What artistic writing can do is to move with a special freedom, creating new spaces of awareness, associating and juxtaposing features of reality, of consciousness, of myth, of aspiration and of belief in patterns and structures which could not be justified by academic or

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scientific criteria. Like philosophy, it has a special mission to operate in the empty space between the known and the unknown, the verifiable and the speculative. And, like philosophy again, it enjoys a special exploratory relationship with man's most extensively employed means of communication—language. 35 Here Caute seems to use an approach that can be usefully linked with L. A. White's notion of "the science of culture" or "culturology," where the cognitive role of art in general and literature in particular is not only recognized but given a precise, scientific status, and where the process of symbolization is not subordinated to logic or other disciplines. It seems unneccessary to emphasize how independently close and similar such conceptions are to Bakhtin's dialogic notion of culture. While Caute uses the science of culture for ideological (that is, Marxist) purposes, the Italian critic Renato Barilli uses it for historicistic and literary ends, that is, for presenting Svevo and Pirandello as the two great innovators and founders of the contemporary novel through "a narrative bent on collaborating in the total institution of a new culture" through the rhetorical (communicative) means of their art. Barilli uses a formula that is acceptable perhaps more because of its polemical thrust than because of its historicist exactness: it is a culture that basically tends "toward the category of being rather than toward that of having" and is founded on the idea of "project" and not of "mirroring." 36 Barilli excessively privileges the notion of novelty, since in it everything appears to be positive, without reservations, while the "profound anguish of modernity" is well known, both in sociology (Peter Berger) and in literature (Debenedetti). 3 ? Barilli has the merit of having vigorously proposed the Svevo-Pirandello line, victorious over others, less powerful or successful in the Italian novel of the early twentieth century, and of having persuasively shown that the project of the two writers consists of indi-

86 I Chapter Three eating the possibility of a new and better mankind—and we might add that their "project" is situated precisely "in the empty space between the known and the unknown, the verifiable and the speculative." Similar conclusions, of course, can be applied to Montale's poetry as well, and particularly to his early books. But it is important to stress that the specific end of my critical analysis is the discovery of structural similarities among different characters and works, the perception of their emblematic value, and the exploration of their status as literary devices. In other words, the context here is that of a thematic, symbolic criticism (Zeno, Moscarda, and Arsenio are considered as fundamental specimens of the antihero), and this criticism is broadened intertextually to explore the cultural meaning of the theme under examination (antihero as code and message) and the semiotic functioning of texts (along the communication axis going from the author-sender to the reader-addressee, without forgetting the context and the contact). For such a purpose I have prepared identity cards for the three characters: they contain precious elements which reveal their strategies, as well as those of their authors. A brief analysis of some of these significant elements will follow.

2. Zeno Cosini and Vitangelo Moscarda Even in Zeno Cosini's name, as Renata Minerbi Treitel has shown, there is a hint to the concept of alienation: Zeno means "stranger," Cosini seems to point to "meaningless little things," and therefore to an acknowledgment and criticism of "reifkation" in Marxian terms.3 8 But the really important aspect of this character (like Valery's Monsieur Teste) is his "coscienza," his moral and psychoanalytic "conscience," his temporal "awareness," his totalizing "knowledge" or literary "con-science"—which is shown to be impossible. In other words, the emphasis is placed on interiority and contemplation rather than on behavior or

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action; individual values are placed above social ones. Zeno is a bourgeois, but a bourgeois picaro who does not really accept the social order around him, the one where he belongs historically: he does not work, has no financial preoccupations, and therefore can devote his time to the whims of his contemplative nature. To use the figure Benjamin pointed out in Baudelaire's poetry, Zeno is a flaneur, in the Triestine streets swept by the wind. He is perplexed, undecided, awkward to the point of being almost "Chaplinesque" (as some critics have defined him),39 seemingly incapable of action, a "diseased" person perpetually searching for "health" but secretly glad and even proud of his sick condition, which privileges him above the "normal" state of the others. His awkwardness and illness are the surest signs of a wholly distorted, limping, deformed universe, subjected to chance and not to dialectics: man is alienated because he is not natural. Zeno is the very effective expression of a grotesque which is first and foremost metaphysical rather than historical or sociological.40 In narrative terms, Zeno's alienation is shown and superseded through characteristic thematic devices: [i] Smoking the last cigarette, which is the brilliant lack of solution to a chain of insoluble dichotomies: between thought and life, will and thought, and—especially important for Svevo and the modern novel in general—chronological time and inner duree: I am sure a cigarette has a more poignant flavor when it is the last. T h e others have their own special taste too, peculiar to them, but it is less poignant. The last has an aroma all its own, bestowed by a sense of victory over oneself and the sure hope of health and strength in the immediate future. The others are important too, as an assertion of one's own freedom, and when one lights them one still has a vision of that future of health and beauty, though it has moved a little farther off.

88 I Chapter Three The dates on my walls displayed every variety of color and I had painted some of them in oils. The latest resolution, renewed in the most ingenuous good faith, found appropriate expression in the violence of its colors, which aimed at making those of the preceding one pale before it. I had a partiality for certain dates because their figures went well together. I remember one of last century which seemed as if it must be the final monument to my vice: "Ninth day of the ninth month, in the year 1899." Surely a most significant date! The new century furnished me with other dates equally harmonious, though in a different way. "First day of the first month in the year 1901." Even today I feel that if only that date could repeat itself I should be able to begin a new life.41 The long quotation is necessary to show the "logical" connection between smoking a perpetually "last" cigarette and the psychological mechanism of the resolutions to quit smoking, and between these resolutions and the dates of the calendar. But we should also note the extreme elegance of Svevo's ironic wink at Dante, from the encounter with Beatrice to the beginning of the Vita nuova, in a combinatorial game in which the dates of the calendar, of chronological time, become pure pretexts for the inner, existential duree. [2] The death of the father, which not only is a perfect example of the psychoanalytic ambivalence underlying the most "normal" sentiments, but also establishes Zeno as narrator, with an almost obvious reference, for today's reader, to the "parricide word" that is placed by Derrida at the very origin of any writing: 42 My bitterest tears were shed on that sofa. Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse Fate without fear of contradiction. I wept because I was losing my father for whom I had always lived. It did not matter that I had been so little with him. Had not all my

Strategies of the Antihero | 89 efforts to become better been made in order to give satisfaction to him? It is true that the success I strove for would have been a personal triumph for me as against him who had always doubted me, but it would have been a consolation to him as well. And now he could wait no longer and was going away convinced of my incurable incapacity. The tears I shed were indeed bitter. While I sit writing, or rather engraving these tragic memories on my paper, I realize that the image that obsessed me at the first attempt to look into my past— the image of an engine drawing a string of coaches u p a hill—came to me for the first time while I lay on the sofa listening to my father's breathing, (p. 41) T h e primary image, the matrix of Zeno's writing is then, without any possibility of doubt, the death of his father. [3] His relationship with his wife Augusta, who is the perfect embodiment of the bourgeoisie, and with his lover Carla, who is romantic and possessive: both of them are necessary to establish Zeno's own detachment, diversity, and finally superiority: "What made you give yourself to me? What have I done to deserve it?" [Zeno asks Carla]. "I thought it was you who had taken me," she said, smiling affectionately at me to show that she did not mean it as a reproach. I remembered that women always insist on the fiction that they have been raped. But she soon saw she had made a mistake, for you may take things, but people must give themselves. . . . As I lay there beside her, my love for Augusta revived in all its force. I had only one wish now: to hurry home to my wife, just in order to see her working like a busy bee, putting all our clothes away in camphor and naphthaline, (p. 190)

90 I Chapter Three If Carla is, however mistakenly, "taken," and if Augusta is seen as a busy bee, Zeno, the one who takes and sees, is yet the one who above all judges. [4] The story of his commercial association, which is a delightful mockery of the capitalist system from within, beginning with the commercial letters thrown u p in the air and left to the chance of falling one way or the other in order to be answered or not, and ending with the buying and selling of a completely unmystical (that is, literally demystified) incense, a merchandise like any other—a perfect instance of a "gratuitous act."43 [5] The use of psychoanalysis as a means of narrating a story and of diversifying Zeno from the others, with the implicit but clear criticism both of the society made up of these others, and of psychoanalysis intended purely as a therapy: "disease" becomes a highly metaphoric term and, contrary to common expectations, acquires a positive value: Of course I have pains from time to time, but what do they matter when my health is perfect? I may have to put on a poultice now and then for some local ailment, but otherwise I force my limbs to keep in healthy motion and never allow them to sink into inertia. Pain and love—the whole of life, in short—cannot be looked on as a disease just because they make us suffer. . . . I am not so naive as to blame the doctor for regarding life itself as a manifestation of disease. Life is a little like disease, with its crises and its periods of quiescence, its daily improvements and setbacks. But unlike other diseases life is always mortal. It admits of no cure. It would be like trying to stop up the holes in our body, thinking them to be wounds. We should die of suffocation almost before we were cured, (pp. 396-97) [6] The final apocalypse, which can be read as a "pharmakon," in the form of a warning, if not a prophecy, significantly directed against contemporary military strate-

Strategies of the Antihero | 91 gists: an enormous explosion caused by some sort of "Doomsday Machines" will free the earth from "parasites and disease," sweep it clean, and make it ready, perhaps, for a better and healthier mankind, or otherwise this same explosion will destroy the earth completely, returning it "to its nebulous state" (p. 397). Instead of quoting Svevo's page, which is famous anyway, I prefer to enlist the support of a well-balanced critical commentary by Sandro Maxia: In his radical nihilism he [Zeno] foresees the invention of an implement ["ordigno"] never seen before, a sort of Total Prosthesis which will save us once and for all from the fear of individual illness and death, even at the cost of cosmic death. But it is also possible—an interpretation of this type was proposed, and the text, in its profound ambiguity, seems to warrant it—it is also possible that the huge redeeming explosion alludes to the birth of a renewed world, the world of possibility (whose needs and exigencies no one can foresee now), for which the inept, the sketch-like Zeno has kept himself available, unlike the so-called healthy ones.44 Whatever the interpretation, in any case, a conclusion is sure: the enormous explosion that no one will hear ("Not with a bang but a whimper," Eliot would say) stands concretely and symbolically to signify that the universe is not anthropocentric, and such a conclusion is posited at the end of a novel that shows all the fragmentations, the "myriads of corpuscles" of an individual self and its "conscience."4s Stylistically, Svevo's literary strategy of the antihero is achieved especially through the following devices: (a) The interposing of a note by a "Dr. S." between Zeno's diary, the author, and the reader, thereby providing an ideal distance to and from them and making the narrator a highly unreliable one,

92 I Chapter Three whose words can never be taken at face value and require an active deciphering by the reader: "He seemed to feel intense curiosity about himself," says Dr. S., the "editor" of the text, referring to Zeno: "But he little knows what surprises lie in wait for him, if someone were to set about analyzing the mass of truths and falsehoods which he has collected here" (p. 5). But of course, also the editor's voice is in turn ambiguous, ambivalent, problematic—certainly it is not an "authority" (and least of all an "authorial" one) that the reader can trust. (b) The choice of a plain, "business" Italian, which is very discursive and nonpoetical, but highly communicative and therefore "didactic" 46 —the perfect linguistic instrument needed to illustrate the author's project, his world view. (c) The narrator's awareness that he is telling simply a story, not the truth—in other words, the selfawareness of art recognizing itself as art and positing the necessity of its being art (in this case a novel rather than a sociological or medical treatise). But let us turn now to Vitangelo Moscarda. There is no particular meaning in the name of the protagonist and narrator of Pirandello's novel (unless there is a possible grotesque play on assonances and associations, for example an angel of life who likes "mostarda" or who, being irritable, "gli salta la mosca al naso," as the Italian saying goes, a fly jumps to his nose); but it is fair that it be so, because like his predecessor, Mattia Pascal, he is only a name to which one, none, and one hundred thousand entities correspond. His individuality is completely lost in the dehumanized relations of his society, yet this dehumanization is necessary for his highest self-awareness. Like

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Zeno, Moscarda is a bourgeois who does not accept the bourgeois order at all. He, too, does not work and has no financial preoccupations, so that his contemplative nature can come to the fore from the very beginning. He, too, is often perplexed and undecided, seemingly incapable of action, awkward, a "madman" juxtaposed to the "sane" others and finally emerging above them. When he does decide and does act, his decision and action will be "gratuitous," scandalous, and revolutionary. In narrative terms, Moscarda's alienation is shown through thematic devices that closely parallel the ones used by Svevo for Zeno, and that perform an analogous function in the structure of the novel: [i] Looking at himself in the mirror, which (like Schlemihl's shadow) is the very image of the doubling of the self, of the chain of dichotomies between contemplation and action, thought and life, will and thought, self and other, and madness and sanity 47 ; it might be worth remembering that the mirror-image has become almost a topos of contemporary art, from the novel (for example, Clappique in Malraux' Man's Fate or Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea) to painting (for example, Picasso's Young Girl at the Mirror). Here is Pirandello's version: But all of a sudden, as my thoughts ran like that, something happened to change my stupor to a looming terror. I beheld in front of my eyes, through no will of my own, the apathetically astonished face of that poor mortified body piteously decomposing, the nose curling up, the eyes turning over inward, the lips contracting upward, and the brows drawing together as if for weeping—they remained like that, in suspense for an instant, and then without warning came crumbling down, to the explosive accompaniment of a couple of sneezes. The thing had happened of itself, at a draught of air from some place or other, without that

94 I Chapter Three poor mortified body's having said a word to me, and quite beyond any will of my own. "To your health!" I cried. And I beheld in the mirror my first madman's smile, (pp. 39-40)*8 It should be noted that this text is entirely based on the grotesque, both thematic (the grimace) and stylistic: the truly dissonant sounds of "apatica attonita" (apathetic astonished), then "arricciare arrovesciare contrarre aggrottar" (curling up, turning over inward, contracting upward, drawing together), and finally "crollar due volte a scatto per Io scoppio d'una coppia di sternuti" (crumbling down, to the explosive accompaniment of a couple of sneezes)—all these sounds produce an unusual accumulation of double consonants which seem the explicit mirroring of the signified in the signifiers. [2] T h e absence of the father (Moscarda is an orphan), with affective "ambivalence" and with "parricide words" that are even stronger—and certainly more dramatic, more theatrical—than Zeno's own: Yet our birth was an involuntary thing in the life of that stranger, the indication of a deed, fruit of an act, something in short that actually causes us shame, arousing in us scorn and almost hatred. And if it is not properly speaking hatred, there is a certain sharp contempt that we are now conscious of in our father's eyes also, which at this second happen to meet our own. We to him, as we stand upright on our feet here, with a pair of hostile eyes, are something that he did not expect from the satisfaction of a momentary need or pleasure, a seed that he unknowingly cast, a seed standing upright now on two feet, with a pair of popping snail's eyes that stealthily survey him and judge him and prevent him now from being wholly what he would like to be, free, another man even with respect to us. (pp. 96-97)

Strategies of the Antihero | 95 [3] T h e relationship with his wife Dida, a very concrete and nasty embodiment of the bourgeoisie, and with the lover Anna Maria, romantic and possessive, both necessary to define his "nonidentity" (he is Genge for the former and Vitangelo for the latter), and therefore to establish his final detachment and superiority—exactly as was the case with Zeno, but with an element of misogyny (autobiographical as well as cultural misogyny) which may point to a direct influence on Pirandello of Weininger's theories on the superiority of the male, considered as the carrier of spiritual values, over the female.« [4] The story of his disengagement from his father's bank, which is a complete, literal rejection of one of the key institutions of capitalist society. [5] The use of madness as a means of distinguishing Moscarda from the others, in order to criticize the system of social roles and the related bourgeois values attached to them. Witness the scene when Moscarda tells the two bankers, who believe him to be mad, to kneel in front of madmen: "Then go—go there where you keep those people locked up; go, go and listen to them talk! You keep them locked up because it's more convenient for you" (p. 150). [6] T h e final, private, "pantheistic" dispersion into nature of the character, who has given up all his belongings, his social position, even his name—a dispersion which has the same function as Zeno's public apocalypse—that is, to point to the possibility of another, better world, different from the present one and projected into a hypothetical future. Stylistically, Pirandello's literary strategy is achieved— significantly in a novel which is the epitome of his theatre—through the following devices: (a) The fragmentation of the story into short chapters, much a la Tristram Shandy:50 these short chapters are self-enclosed scenes doing away with the

96 I Chapter Three traditional plot and breaking the "story" continuously, showing it to be precisely that, a story. (b) The choice of a middle Italian idiom, highly communicative and didactic, furthering a cognitive operation. (c) The rhetorical addresses of the narrator, a "man from the underground," to the readers, such as the following, immediately underscored by a metatextual commentary in parentheses: "Was I not, in all truth, setting out to play a dirty trick upon Signor Vitangelo Moscarda? Yes, good people, that is what it was! a dirty trick (you will have to excuse all these winks on my part, but I have need of winking, to wink like this, since, not being aware just what impression I am making upon you at this moment, I may be able thus to obtain a hint)" (p. 131). These rhetorical addresses encourage, if not postulate, an "active, personal response," 51 and provide space for it within the fiction itself: again, the self-awareness of art as such.s 2

3. Arsenio Let us turn now to Montale's Arsenio. First, the text of the poem, "the most appealing and newest lyric, if not the most perfect, of Ossi":53 I turbini sollevano la polvere sui tetti, a mulinelli, e sugli spiazzi deserti, ove i cavalli incappucciati annusano la terra, fermi innanzi ai vetri luccicanti degli alberghi. SuI corso, in faccia al mare, tu discendi in questo giorno or piovorno ora acceso, in cui par scatti

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a sconvolgerne Tore uguali, strette in trama, un ritornello di castagnette. E il segno d'un'altra orbita: tu seguilo. Discendi all'orizzonte che sovrasta una tromba di piombo, alta sui gorghi, piu d'essi vagabonda: salso nembo vorticante, soffiato dal ribelle elemento alle nubi; fa che il passo su la ghiaia ti scricchioli e t'inciampi il viluppo dell'alghe: quell'istante e forse, molto atteso, che ti scampi dal fifiire il tuo viaggio, anello d'una catena, immoto andare, oh troppo noto delirio, Arsenio, d'immobilita . . . Ascolta tra i palmizi il getto tremulo dei violini, spento quando rotola il tuono con un fremer di lamiera percossa; la tempesta e dolce quando sgorga bianca la Stella di Canicola nel cielo azzurro e lunge par la sera ch'e prossima: se il fulmine la incide dirama come un albero prezioso entro la luce che s'arrosa: e il timpano degli tzigani e il rombo silenzioso. Discendi in mezzo al buio che precipita e muta il mezzogiorno in una notte di globi accesi, dondolanti a riva,— e fuori, dove un'ombra sola tiene mare e cielo, dai gozzi sparsi palpita l'acetilene— finche goccia trepido il cielo, fuma il suolo che s'abbevera, tutto d'accanto ti sciaborda, sbattono

98 I Chapter Three Ie tende molli, un fruscio immenso rade la terra, giu s'afflosciano stridendo Ie lanterne di carta sulle strade. Cosi sperso tra i vimini e Ie stuoie grondanti, giunco tu che Ie radici con se trascina, viscide, non mai svelte, tremi di vita e ti protendi a un vuoto risonante di lamenti soffocati, la tesa ti ringhiotte dell'onda antica che ti volge; e ancora tutto che ti riprende, strada portico mura specchi ti figge in una sola ghiacciata moltitudine di morti, e se un gesto ti sfiora, una parola ti cade accanto, quello e forse, Arsenio, nell'ora che si scioglie, il cenno d'una vita strozzata per te sorta, e il vento la porta con la cenere degli astri. The winds lift the dust over the roofs, in whirls, and on the deserted places where hooded horses sniff the ground, standing in front of the shining windows of the hotels. On the boulevard facing the sea you descend in this day now rainy now lit, in which it seems that there sprints to upset the equal hours, tied in a weft, a refrain of castanets. It is the sign of another orbit: you, follow it. Descend to the horizon that is overhung by a laden whirl, high over the waves, more vagabond than them: a salty spray whirling, blown by the rebellious element to the clouds; make your step

Strategies of the Antihero | 99 on the ground creak, and the tangle of seaweed trip you: that instant is perhaps, much awaited, that makes you escape from finishing your voyage, link of a chain, motionless going, oh too well known delirium, Arsenio, of immobility . . . Listen among the palm trees to the trembling spurt of violins, put out when the thunder rolls with a shaking of smitten plate; the storm is sweet when Sirius spouts white in the azure sky and far away seems the evening that is near: if the thunderbolt etches it, it ramifies like a precious tree in the light that becomes rose: and the timpano of the tziganes is the silent roar. Descend in the midst of the darkness that is falling and changes midday into a night of lit globes, swinging on the shore— and outside, where an only shadow holds sea and sky, from the scattered boats palpitates the acetylene— until the sky drops timorous, the ground steams while being soaked, everything near you swashes, the wet awnings flap, an immense rustle grazes the earth, down are flabby shrieking the paper lanterns in the streets. So, lost amid wickers and dripping mats, you a reed dragging its roots along, slippery, never eradicated, you tremble with life and reach out toward a void resounding with stifled laments, the brim swallows you of the ancient wave that turns you; and still

100 I Chapter Three everything that takes you back, street arcade walls mirrors fixes you in a single iced multitude of dead, and if a gesture grazes you, a word falls next to you, that is perhaps, Arsenio, in the hour that is melting, the signal of a strangled life arisen for you, and the wind carries it with the ash of the stars. Even before examining the traits of the eponymous character, especially in relation to those of Zeno and Moscarda, we should briefly check the phonic and figurative levels of the poem and emphasize the metonymic function of linguistic repetition, at least as far as the developments from "Corno inglese" are concerned, since "Corno inglese" does indeed precede, prepare, and foreshadow "Arsenio." 54 Here is, then, the "mimetic presentation" of the strident sound of "un ritornello / di castagnette" in internal rhyme with "tetti" and "strette" and in dissonance with the pattern of or sounds (a last, residual echo of "Corno inglese"?): these ors are numerous in the first stanza (corso, giorno, or piovorno ora, Yore, ritornello) and throughout the poem, with a renewed frequency in the last stanza (ancora, portico, morti, forse, nell'ora, sorta, porta). Here are the sibilants and fricatives of the third stanza: "tra i palmizi il getto tremulo I dei violini," "rotola I il tuono con un fremer di lamiera I percossa," "e il timpano I degli tzigani e il rombo silenzioso": these dissonant phonic values are taken up and echoed in the crescendo of "trepido, sciaborda, fruscio, s'afflosciano stridendo," and "lanterne di carta sulle strade" (the approaching of the storm) in the fourth stanza, and "strozzata, sorta, astri" in the last. It should be noted that, again as in "Corno inglese," this series contrasts-harmonizes with a parallel series of nasals, dentals, and palatals carefully varied: aiscendi, orizzowie, Xxomba, piombo, vagabonda, nembo, vorticanie, elemento, in-

Strategies of the Antihero | 101 ciampi, istante, scampi, spento, tempesta, entro, timpano, rombo, dondolann, ombra, accanto, tende, stridmifc), grondanti, protendi, risonanie, lammii, onda, antica, vento. Above all, at the phonic-semantic level, there is a truly extraordinary insistence, dissonant vis ά vis the average norm of Italian, on proparoxytones: from "turbini, sollevano, polvere" (all in the first line) to "annusano" (in inter­ nal rhyme with "sollevano") and "sconvolgerne" in the first stanza; "orbita, seguilo," and "scricchioli" in the second stanza; from "tremulo, rotola," and "Canicola" (in rhyme and quasi-rhyme) to "prossima, fulmine, albero," and "tim­ pano" in the third stanza; from "precipita, palpita, trepido" (again in rhyme and quasi-rhyme) to "s'abbevera, sbattono," and "s'afflosciano" in the fourth; from "vimini, viscide," and "portico" to "moltitudine" and "cenere" in the last. It is an impressive list, both because of the num­ bers (twenty-six terms) and the lexical choices, a list which is a truly comic, spoken language anticipating at the level of signifiers the meaning of the poem and of the character.ss Hence it is possible to state that in "Arsenio" the ob­ ject ends up looking like the poetry expressing it, in a cir­ cular structure typical of iconicity. As for the figurative level, certainly the reader must have perceived the descriptive effectiveness of the poem, even in my literal translation and without any critical sug­ gestion. T h e r e is in the text an accumulation of realistic as well as disquieting details, from the "hooded horses" that in "deserted I places sniff the ground" to the series of nouns "the boulevard, the palm trees, the lit globes, the scattered boats, the wet awnings, the paper lanterns, the wickers and the dripping mats," culminating in the light­ ning, paratactic sequence "street arcade I walls mirrors." They are all details of the setting, and they are the back­ ground (the context) for the central description of the poem, the storm which had been just touched upon in "Corno inglese": the laden whirl, high on the waves, more vagabond than them, a "salty spray I whirling, blown by

102 I Chapter Three the rebellious element to the clouds." Or consider the scene when Sirius appears in the sky "and far away seems the evening / that is near: if the thunderbolt etches it, I it ramifies like a precious tree I in the light that becomes rose"; this scene prepares not only the crescendo of the storm itself (already underscored at the phonic level), but especially the final stanza with Arsenio's inner landscape: "a void resounding with stifled I laments," "a single I iced multitude of dead." Such mental visions are correlated to the metaphoric images of the poetic voice, which were in turn prepared by the corresponding ones of the second stanza ("The sign of another orbit," "link of a chain," "delirium of immobility"): they culminate in the "signal of a strangled life," "and the wind carries it with the ash of the stars." All these metaphoric images are an integral and extremely significant part of Montale's poetic discourse, to which we should turn our attention as it goes beyond the imaginary (the figurative) and is shaped in rational articulations—the forms of meaning. Let us take up our critical itinerary at this level, with Arsenio's identity card. The old-fashioned name has the austere meaning of "burnt," already noted in chapter i, to which, following another etymology, we might add an ironic hint at virility, in juxtaposition to Eusebio, the author's favorite nickname. It would seem to recall another poetic character like Eliot's Prufrock, rather than novelistic characters like Zeno and Moscarda.s 6 Yet the linking, if not the comparison, of Arsenio with Zeno and Moscarda seems not only advisable but necessary. 57 Arsenio's identity card cannot be as complete as those of the other two antiheroes, precisely because he is a lyric and not a novelistic character, and among poetry's referents birth certificates are certainly not primary. Montale himself stated, in reply to a question: "I would not know what to say about poetic characters, especially today when characters tend to disappear even from the novel. Arsenio and the Nestorian

Strategies of the Antihero | 103 are projections of myself. In any case the character who appears in a poem will be much more synthetic than the character of a novel. However, within certain limits, even verse can narrate," 58 as is demonstrated for example by Montale's favorite poet, Robert Browning, "a great narrator in verse," 59 who was dear to those, like "Pound and company," who "in writing their lyrics did not resign themselves to the limitations of the lyric genre but dreamed of a poetry that should be lyric and epic, chronicle and novel, elegy and hymn, satire and invective."60 Arsenio, then, is a character nevertheless, and a very emblematic one, as an embodiment of Montale's major themes and as a catalyzer of culture. 61 Like Zeno and Moscarda, Arsenio is shown to have all the traits of a bourgeois character who, however, does not seem to accept the bourgeois order, or at least to fit into it properly. He is a flaneur on the elegant seashore of some Riviera resort (presumably), and it is fair to assume that he does not have serious financial preoccupations; the city is deserted, but the crowd is inscribed in every scene of the poem (like the Parisian crowd in Baudelaire), and it is the experience of the crowd, the shock caused by it (Erfahrung, not ErlebnL·) that determines the relationship between Arsenio and the landscape on the one hand, and between Arsenio and himself on the other. 62 So, Montale's poetic double is alone, absorbed in his own thoughts, undecided, perplexed, seemingly incapable of action and awkward in his strolls through pebbles and seaweeds, precisely "Chaplinesque," like Zeno, that is, like him, an improbable bourgeois clown. Besides, perhaps like a character by Musil, he appears to be very "atmospheric," if not meteoropathic and "without qualities." 63 In narrative terms, as far as a narrative can be extracted from a poem, Arsenio's alienation is portrayed or conveyed through the following images: [i] T h e doubling poet-character: Arsenio is the apathetic addressee of the imperatives or exhortations uttered

104 I Chapter Three by the poetic voice ("follow it, descend, listen . . ."), and his difficulty of living is expressed by the identification with the "giunco," the reed that drags its roots along and is lost among wickers and dripping mats. We cannot exclude that the relationship reed-wickers, in superseding another one between life and death, becomes also an ironic hint to Montale's stoicism—he is like a reed, not a rock. [2] The waiting for a storm, for "another orbit," for something that will terminate his senseless wandering, something posited beyond his present condition of "equal hours, tied in a weft," something that should somehow be the decisive element in an unsatisfactory existential condition. [3] The "delirium of immobility," which expresses a dramatic dichotomy between life and the absolute, between Arsenio's thoughts and life; it can be compared with Zeno's time, described by Montale himself as "stagnating, yet always moving,"6* as well as with Moscarda's present tense—a series of snapshots. This delirium of immobility is counterpointed by equivalent images throughout Ossi, notably in "In limine" ("Se procedi t'imbatti I tu forse nel fantasma . . . ," if you proceed you run I perhaps into the phantasm . . .) and "Mediterraneo" ("Il tuo delirio sale agli astri ormai," your delirium goes up to the stars); and it is also connected to those other metaphysical images, "the sign of another orbit," the "link of a chain," which point to a whole series of Montalean "varchi" (passages), from "I limoni" to "Corno inglese" again, or from "Crisalide" to "La casa dei doganieri." [4] The final cosmic image, significantly introduced by a hypothetical clause ("if a gesture grazes you . . ."): "that is perhaps the signal of a strangled life arisen for you, and the wind carries it with the ash of the stars." I shall not insist here, especially after the analysis of "Corno inglese," on the presence and function of this wind in "Arsenio," a wind that like Shelley's destroys and preserves, is violent and creative, personal and universal with its echoes of lay

Strategies of the Antihero | 105 religiosity and visionary quality. I shall simply remark that the ending of "Ode to the West Wind" resounds in "Arsenio," in an unequivocal manner, as my italics show: 65 Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! And if Shelley's romantic impetuousness and optimism are attenuated in Montale, perhaps because of Debussy's and Mallarme's intertextual mediation, 66 I wish to emphasize that the vision of the "ash of the stars" carried by the wind, with the related sense of death in Arsenio, is the culmination of his estrangement, of his isolation, of his alienation from the world of the living; it is, at the same time, the culmination of his potential as a poet (along with the ash of the stars, the wind does carry "the signal of a strangled life arisen for you"). Thus the final image reflects both his inner conscience and the external macrocosm; thematically as well as structurally it corresponds to Zeno's apocalypse and to Moscarda's annulment in nature. The global, cosmic sense of death common to our three great authors makes them share a typically modern, cultural climate, one which Bernstein feels in Mahler's Ninth Symphony, a "musical presentation of death itself, which paradoxically reanimates us every time we listen to it."67 Stylistically, Montale's literary strategy of the antihero, or of the poet who does not want to be laureate, who prefers his own diminutio antiaulica, is carried out through four poetic devices which have become almost commonplace in contemporary poetry (according to Friedrich's still fundamental analysis). First, the use of the oxymoron (such as "immoto andare," motionless going, or "rombo silenzioso," silent roar) as a sign of the contradictory nature, absurdity, and vanity of the whole reality. Second, the use

106 I Chapter Three of the insistent imperatives (with the related "tu" form), which mark the difficult relationship of the poetic character with the others and the world, while the indicative mode, by contrast, would be the sign of his harmony with them and with it.68 It should also be noted that from another point of view both the imperative and the vocative are fundamental elements for the specificity of poetry, because, if it is true that it is necessary "to distinguish two forces in poetry, the narrative and the apostrophic," one opposed to the other, apostrophe triumphs in the lyric: "Apostrophe resists narrative because its now is not a moment in a temporal sequence, but the now of discourse, of writing," which creates itself as an event.6^ Third, the choice of "objective correlatives" to indicate inner states of conscience, as well as to portray the fragmentation of external reality, its loss of unity and of meaning. Montale warns, however, that he "was moved by instinct, not by a theory (Eliot's Objective correlative,' I believe, did not exist yet in 1928 when "Arsenio" was published in Criterion)" and that his goal was to break down the "barrier between the inner and the exterior," which seemed to him "nonexistent even from a gnoseologic viewpoint.'"70 And finally, the use of a "broken" poetic language (negativity, dissonance), corresponding to the break in society and the world today, and instituting the self-awareness of poetry as poetry, in sharp contrast with D'Annunzio's high poeticity. Zeno, Moscarda, and Arsenio are three emblematic characters because they are antiheroes envisaged by their respective authors not simply as mirrors of a crisis (alienated consciences), but as projects of a different and better idea of man (conscious alienation). Through their structural homologies and affinities they carry a precise symbolic meaning, they constitute a literary code and message, and they form part of a literary and cognitive strategy common to Svevo, Pirandello, and Montale, as well as to

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the few, true innovators of contemporary European literature. It might be said that Zeno's apocalypse, Moscarda's pantheistic epiphany, and Arsenio's cosmic storm are a sort of "dystopia" or anti-utopia, analogous to the political allegories of Zamyatin, Huxley, or Orwell, which Caute characterizes as "didactic because they are warnings as well as prophecies.'"?1 It seems significant that such a message should be conveyed through the strategies of individual figures like Zeno, Moscarda, and Arsenio: "Literature, as an act of revolt, is historically structured and attuned to represent the individual constituent in the parliament of collective culture. . . . The last individualist is born not only out of the logic of liberalism, but out of the very womb of the novel,"—and of poetry as well, for that matter. Both in the case of the novel and of poetry, in fact, "it is a question of a literary construction of dystopia recognizing and exploring by means of internal alienations its own nature as sign, symbol, and book."?2 You will recall the references I made to the "liminality" of Montale's poetry "on the edge," posited between the imaginary and the real just like Morandi's etchings: these references are fully confirmed, and radicalized, by the notion of dystopia. The logical conclusion that can be drawn from the preceding analysis is that only on a superficial level do the strategies of the antihero lead to some sort of self-destruction; on the contrary, while conveying what Kermode called "the sense of an ending,"" while being an unequivocal expression of the "disintegration of the integrity that an individual had possessed in epic (and in tragedy)," they are at the same time "the necessary preparatory steps toward a new, more complex wholeness, on a higher level of human development." 74 Thus the novelization of literature brings about a renewed assertion of man, no longer with a capital M, no longer Hero at the center of the universe, but still man, who carries with him, lucidly or comically, one of his highest values—the written, victorious word.

Epilogue: The Plainclothes Clown Every classic, when it is vital, is to be questioned outside of conservative interpretations, in order to be a stimulus, a term of confrontation, which is all the more substantive the more it is inserted in the spirit of its time. EZio RAIMONDi,

Tecniche della critica letteraria

It is now necessary to probe further into the cultural meaning of Montale's poetry, by taking into consideration that aspect of Arsenio which is most intimately tied to his being a poetic, in fact a metapoetic character, an icon of meanings inherent in his very form. There is no doubt that Arsenio is a projection of the poet, not only or not so much in an autobiographical sense, but as "the poetic consciousness that brings the poem into being," so that (to complete Rebecca West's beautiful insight) "the poem itself, like its marginal protagonist, remains on the threshold, and its primary message is that of the dynamism of its own emergence into form." 1 As poetic consciousness, Arsenio appears to hold a prominent position in Montale's entire oeuvre: he is a fundamental focus toward which a whole series of modes converges—from dissonance to diminutio antiaulica, from liminality to alienation, from stoicism to self-irony, from the self-conscious double to the antihero's objectification. These modes allow us to consider Arsenio as the metonymic ex108

The Plainclothes Clown | 109 pression of modernity, an Italian Monsieur Teste or Monsieur Croche, both text and witness of so much contemporary culture. I shall group these modes according to two lines: the identification between Arsenio and the poet, and the identification between the poet and the mountebank. Both these identifications should be considered as summarizing as well as symbolic, almost a transcendental autobiography of Eugenio Montale. Remembering his constant and declared admiration for Baudelaire, the poet of modernity, it is not difficult to single out in the latter (following the critical itinerary sagaciously indicated by Raimondi) a dandyism that seems to me to be at the origin of many cultural attitudes of Montale as well, beginning with the stoicism that was shown to be so important for readers like Calvino and Arcangeli: "And since it is impossible to be a dandy without being aware of it, dandyism implies a role and a mask, as precisely the Stoics used to teach: only, instead of magnanimity and harmony with the cosmos, there is the certitude of downgrading and degradation, so that the sterile hero of eccentric originality, as soon as he becomes the poet of himself, discovers that he is a pariah, a mime, a mountebank, the grotesque face of tragic clearsightedness." 2 We need only adapt this quotation to Montale, who, although he did not critically thematize the figure of the dandy (as Baudelaire did), deals with it in an eccentric place, a report from England, "Paradiso delle donne e degli snob" (Paradise of women and snobs), where he describes British dandyism in the following terms: It is probably the gesture with which an individual protests against the overwhelming force of a nature external to us and of a social milieu that conditions us; it is the sign of a disharmony, of a lack of conciliation with the world. It is a gesture which implies at the same time optimism, desperation, and faith in the individual destiny of man. . . . I don't know up to which

110 I Epilogue point this humanistic dandyism—which was also Ugo Foscolo's and Herman Melville's, two non-Britons— will be able to resist the shock investing Great Britain. What survives of it is the compassion of man for himself, self-irony, the taste for distinguishing oneself from the amorphous mass, desire to give a style to life.3 Montale's report is concluded with a significant sentence: "So much is enough, for those who love Europe and its cultural heritage, to find themselves perfectly at home in England." 4 So Montale declares his identification with the dandy in a profound and absolute manner. Since the dandy, when he becomes the poet of himself, discovers he is a mountebank, a clown, we should now turn back to Montale's poetry, particularly to his remake of Debussy's "Minstrels," and above all to the skillful intertextual allusions of "Arsenio." Let us first examine the identification between the character Arsenio and the poet. We should immediately recall a Montalean statement of 1951: Having felt ever since my birth a total disharmony with the surrounding reality, the subject matter of my inspiration could not be other than that disharmony. I am not denying that fascism firstly, and the war afterwards, and the civil war later still, made me unhappy. However, there existed in me reasons for unhappiness that went much beyond and farther than these phenomena. I think it is a case of lack of adjustment, a psychologic and moral maladjustment which is typical of all natures with an introspective background, that is, all poetic natures.s What is remarkable is Montale's insistence on disharmony, on the lack of conciliation with the world, perceived as the situation of both the dandy and the poet, and as a justification, for both of them, for their desire to give a style to life. Again in 1975 Montale reiterated: "My subject was the

The Plainclothes Clown | 111

malaise of life and also the vain effort to disassemble it to see how it is made." 6 Certainly, these self-comments by Montale do not modify the historical, cultural, and political interpretations treated in the preceding pages of this book: they simply vindicate the rights of poetry, or better still, the rights and also the limitations of the poet in his human intentions: "I lived my time with the minimum of cowardice that was possible for my feeble strengths," and "I soon thought, and still think, that art is the form of life of the one who truly does not live—a compensation or a substitute." 7 Such explicit statements are then taken up in later poems, like "Botta e risposta I" (Thrust and parry I), in which Arsenio concludes his answer to the first thrust by his interlocutor with these words: Ma ora tu sai tutto di me, della mia prigionia e del mio dopo; ora sai che non puo nascere l'aquila dal topo. 8 But now you know everything about me, my captivity and my afterwards; now you know that an eagle cannot be born from a mouse. Or let us read "Per finire" (As an ending): Non sono un Leopardi, lascio poco da ardere ed e gia troppo vivere in percentuale. Vissi al cinque per cento, non aumentate la dose. Troppo spesso invece piove sul bagnato. 9 I am not a Leopardi, I leave little to burn and living in percentage is already too much. I lived at five percent, do not increase the dosage. Too often, instead, it rains on the wet.

112 I Epilogue I believe I am not increasing the dosage if I emphasize the "burning," typical of Montale's poetry from the very beginnings of "the heart" in "Minstrels," and if I quote also from "L'eroismo" (Heroism), the 1975 poem that should have been titled "L'eroe mancato" (The hero manque): 1 0 Clizia mi suggeriva di ingaggiarmi tra i guerriglieri di Spagna e piu di una volta mi sento morto a Guadalajara ο superstite illustre che mal reggesi in piedi dopo anni di galera. Ma nulla di cio avvenne. . . . Qualche cosa ricordo. Un prigioniero mio che aveva in tasca un Rilke e fummo amici per pochi istanti; e inutili fatiche e tonfi di bombarde e il fastidioso ticchettio dei cecchini. Ben poco e anche inutile per lei che non amava Ie patrie e n'ebbe una per caso." Clizia used to suggest that I enlist among the Spanish guerrillas and more than once I feel dead at Guadalajara or a famous survivor who is hardly able to stand on his feet after years in jailBut nothing like that happened. . . . Some things I do remember. A prisoner—mine— who had a Rilke in his pocket and we were friends for a few moments; and useless labors and thuds of bombards and the annoying ticking of snipers. Very little, and even useless for her who did not love fatherlands and had one of them by chance. Self-irony, for ousness. Let us Montale sent to vember 8, 1917,

sure, but also profound and lasting seri­ read, a posteriori, the letter the young his sister Marianna, from Parma on No­ on the eve of his experience of the same

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war evoked at a distance of many years in the quoted lines from "L'eroismo": "I am a friend of the invisible, and I don't take into account anything but what makes itself felt and does not show itself; I do not believe and I cannot believe in anything we touch and see. I am, then, just an anti-military. Even when I write, doesn't it seem as if I were talking in a soft voice in order to let it be understood, in between syllables, a bit of what I am unable to tell even myself?" 12 It can really be said that in between Montale's syllables there is always, in his entire itinerary as a man and an artist, a highly civilized fidelity to a lived and self-con­ scious antiheroism which is in turn an integral and funda­ mental part of the figure of the poet as a clown or moun­ tebank. We should recall that in chapter ι, while analyzing "Min­ strels," I make reference to the presence of the topos of the clown in music, painting, and poetry, verifying above all its presence within the antiheroism of modern art with­ out insisting too much on its meaning. It is now necessary to deepen and articulate this meaning. In his beautiful book, Portrait de Vartiste en saltimbanque, Starobinski sug­ gests that the ironic play of artists who define themselves as saltimbanques, from Flaubert to Jarry, from Henry Miller to Joyce, from Rouault to Picasso, has the symbolic value of "a mocking epiphany of art and the artist. A criticism of bourgeois honor is doubled by a self-criticism directed against the artistic vocation itself. We must recognize such an attitude as one of the characteristic components of 'mo­ dernity.' "1S Starobinski explores the anthropological ori­ gins of the clown (or acrobat, mountebank, harlequin), and points out its "original link with the realm of death" (p. 130), a link which is in turn articulated into the two complementary attitudes of angelism (the clown as a figure of Christ) and of satanism (the clown as a figure of the devil). They are the opposite and complementary directions taken by the desire to go beyond the world, and more exactly to

114 I Epilogue introduce into this world the testimony of a passion which came from elsewhere and sees an elsewhere. As a scapegoat, the clown is expelled from the world, carries our sins and shames, crosses into death; through his crossing, he makes us pass into salvation. As a transgressing demon, the clown rises among us as an intruder come from the external darkness: perhaps he is the one who had been expelled in the beginning, the menace that cannot be forgotten or rejected for long. (P- !3 6 ) T h e clown's passage into death is further explained by Rilke's fifth Duino elegy (perhaps one of the poems Montale found in the pocket of his Austrian prisoner during World War One, whereby they became friends for a few brief moments?): "In Rilke the world of the saltimbanques is symbolically posited between earth and sky, between life and death, . . . where everything is ordered around the secret of a passage toward the work of art and its accomplishment, which in turn is an allegorical but insufficient anticipation of another passage, which will insure the true achievement of love in death." 14 Starobinski concludes that indeed Rilke's poet-mountebank passes from the "pure insufficiency" (of the body, the world, life) into the "empty overabundance" (of art and death). In such a passage, art displays its whole epistemological and creative, disquieting and salvific function: "In a utilitarian world, intertwined by the closely knit network of significant relationships, in a practical universe, in which everything is assigned a function, a value for use or exchange, the entrance of the clown makes some mesh in the net break, and into the suffocating fullness of accepted meanings, he opens up a passage through which a wind of disquietude and life will blow" (p. 141, italics mine). Really, I do not have to insist on the "Montalean" references of Starobinski's quotation. In Montale the clown, the metaphoric clown in everyday clothes who breaks some mesh in the suffocating net of accepted

The Plainclothes Clown | 115 meanings and opens up a passage, a way through which a wind of disquietude and life will blow is Arsenio, and Arsenio is the poet's double, as we know. (It might be worth recalling in this context that for Montale poetry is "music made with words and even with ideas.") 15 Starobinski's statement is astonishing because it does not appear that he had Montale in mind at all; whereby it can be said that language claims for itself (at a cultural and anthropological level) those figures that animate the discourse (the parole) of both the critic and the poet: the metaphors of the broken mesh in the net, of the opening in the accepted meanings, and of the wind of disquietude and life are part of a general, human experience, they are expressive cliches functioning as such in the critic's language, as codes carrying meanings, while in the poet they are first of all inserted into a syncategorematic chain, into a metonymic context from which they derive their primary force as signifiers (and only secondarily as signifieds, as meanings). Then the active participation of the reader is necessary, who must be able to link the two different texts and make them interact. We are dealing then with figures of a dialogic discourse, which is central to the novelization of literature and is above all a lively testimony of the "European man," the modern antihero. In concluding, I propose a metonymic (and emblematic) interpretation of Arsenio as a "portrait of the artist as a saltimbanque" in Starobinski's sense. It is worth repeating and grouping here again the textual elements on which the possibility of this interpretation is based. Accompanied by "a refrain of castanets," by "the trembling spurt of violins," and by "the timpano of the tziganes" (instruments and musical forms played by minstrels that would not be out of place in a circus), Arsenio appears on the scene of the poem with a descending movement, "in the midst of the darkness that falls": he is an ambivalent figure, literally come from "the external darkness," symptom of a passion that "sees an elsewhere," carrier of a mes-

116 I Epilogue sage of salvation and/or menace. He is "lost amid wickers and dripping mats," clumsy, a "reed" dragging its roots along, and at the same time he "tremblefs] with life and reach[es] out toward a void resounding with stifled laments"; like an acrobat in precarious balance in his "delirium of immobility," Arsenio is certainly suspended between life and death, between earth and sky, between the "pure insufficiency" of the real milieu around him ("street arcade walls mirrors") and the "empty overabundance" of his inner landscape ("a void resounding with stifled laments," "a single iced multitude of dead"). He is the alter ego whom the poet urges to follow "the sign of another orbit" which upsets "the equal hours, tied in a weft," to catch that much-awaited instant that should make him "escape from finishing [his] voyage, link of a chain, motionless going. . . ." Everything is ordered symbolically "around the secret of a passage toward the work of art and its accomplishment," which is in turn, as in Rilke, "an allegorical but insufficient anticipation of another passage"; when the storm is unleashed "in the hour that is melting" (that is, in the time of liminality), Arsenio remains definitely suspended between life ("a strangled life") and death ("the ash of the stars"), both of which are carried by the wind which blows through, which is Montale's poetry. T h e substantial and formal essence of this poetry can be said to be the effort of a metaphysical mountebank to conjoin the extremes, to "receive the irrational into his spiritual world, but without renouncing reason." 16 It is then a "poetry of experience" in search of truth that cannot be univocal and definite because it is entangled in diverse languages: hence the importance (not only stylistic, but epistemological and dialogic) of dissonance and diminutio antiaulica. Hence the meaning of Montale's impossibility of reaching the absolute expression, and therefore the suspension of poetry between the real and the imaginary, its tension toward a virtual perfection that can be approached at best metonymically, but without ever giving up, always

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insisting firmly, stoically, in the effort. And this constantly renewed effort expresses the dynamism, the openness, the modernity of a poetic word, Montale's, that is among the most intense and self-possessed in the European culture of this century. If we remember, with Raimondi, that from Baudelaire onward modernity shows itself "with its double face—daily and novelistic, ridiculous and sublime,"1? we can certainly understand Montale's late but definitive "salvaging" of "Minstrels" into his oeuvre in verse; and I believe that the centrality of the figure conceived as his poetic double— dressed in the grey suit of the daily novelistic or, as he would put it, "in the epic of the grey causality of our everyday life"'8—will stand out in all its emblematic clarity: Arsenio, the clumsy bourgeois antihero, the sublime and ridiculous mountebank, the Schlemihlian shadow which elsewhere in Ossi di seppia "la canicola stampa sopra uno scalcinato muro," the noonday sun imprints on an unplastered wall.

Notes Chapter One. Debussy and the Wind i. Eugenio Montale, Sulla poesia (Milan: Mondadori, 1976), p. 563. Vittorio Pica (1864-1930) was an influential art journalist and for many years the secretary of the Venice Biennale exhibitions. He was an avant-garde critic who discovered and promoted many movements and artists, in both literature and the visual arts. Besides the French impressionists, he emphasized the importance of the symbolists. Among his numerous collections of essays are All'avanguardia, L'arte dell'Estremo Oriente, and L'arte europea. It should be noted that Pica had another great merit: he was among the very first to write a critical presentation in Italy of Mallarme's oeuvre, in an article of 1886 now in Letteratura d'eccezione (Milan: Baldini e Castoldi, 1889); see Olga Ragusa, MaUarme in Italy: A Study in Literary Influence and Critical Response (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1954), pp. 77ff2. On this subject one should see at least three books by Eugenio Montale: Pastelli e disegni (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1966); Farfalla di Dinard (Milan: Mondadori, i960); and Prime alia Scala (Milan: Mondadori, ig82); as well as the biography by Giulio Nascimbeni, Eugenio Montale (Milan: Longanesi, 1969). 3. See especially Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, tr. V. McGee, ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 4. Suffice it to recall the many pages devoted by Hugo Frie118

Notes to Chapter One | 119 drich to the structural unity among modern poetry, music, and painting in The Structure of Modern Poetry, tr. J. Neugroschel (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1974); and Eugenio Montale, Quaderno genovese, ed. L. Barile (Milan: Mondadori, 1983), p. 41: "Modern art. It is a fact that literature tends more and more toward musicality and color, while music and painting are directed fully toward literature. This is a key to remember." It is to be noted that this entry is dated 1917. 5. Felix Feneon, Au-dela de I'impressionisme, ed. F. Cachin (Paris: Hermann, 1966), pp. 84—85; the text is from 1887. See also John Rewald, The History of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gaugin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973 and 1978 respectively). These two volumes are fundamental to following the complex relationships among impressionists, post-impressionists and symbolists, relationships at the very base of the developments of modern painting, beginning with Paul Cezanne. 6. See Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, tr. H. Zohn, ed. H. Arendt, pp. 155-200 (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 197 n. 8: T h e daily sight of a lively crowd may once have constituted a spectacle to which one's eyes had to adapt first. On the basis of this supposition, one may assume that once the eyes had mastered this task they welcomed opportunities to test their newly acquired faculties. This would mean that the technique of Impressionist painting, whereby the picture is garnered in a riot of dabs of color, would be a reflection of experiences with which the eyes of a big-city dweller have become familiar. A picture like Monet's "Cathedral of Chartres," which is like an ant-heap of stone, would be an illustration of this hypothesis. See also Anne Higonnet, Margaret Higonnet, and Patrice Higonnet, "Fagades: Walter Benjamin's Paris," Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (Mar. 1984), pp. 391-419. 7. See Ardengo Soffici, Scoperte e massacri: Scritti sull'arte, igo8— 1913, 2d ed. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1929), pp. 235, 209-93; and Feneon, Au-dela de I'impressionisme, pp. 135-37. 8. Vittorio Pica, Gl'Impressionisti Francesi (Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d'Arti Grafiche, 1908), pp. 55 and passim. The book has

120 I Notes to Chapter One 252 illustrations and ten plates, and a long chapter on Monet, "the most convinced and most aware initiator of the movement, and the clearest, most trustworthy, and most complete represen­ tative of impressionism" (p. 51). Renoir is defined "a virtuoso of chromatic dissonances" (p. 98), and there is even doubt placed on the very label "impressionism," "a rather inaccurate name" (p.

Η)· 9. Laura Barile, in Eugenio Montale, "Tre articoli ritrovati," ed. L. Barile, Inventario, n.s., 4 (Jan.—Apr. 1982), pp. 11 and 20 n. 18. Renato Serra (1884—1915) was a writer, critic, and intellec­ tual who might have countered Benedetto Croce's influence, had he not died in World War One. His most important work was "Esame di coscienza di un letterato" (on the relationship between literature and war), but all of his letters and his literary, moral, and political writings (Scritti letterari, morali e politici) are worth re­ membering. On Serra see the critical commentary by Gianfranco Contini, Altri esercizi, 1942—1971 (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), pp. 77— 100, and especially the fundamental pages by Ezio Raimondi, Il lettore di provincia: Renato Serra (Florence: Le Monnier, 1964). On Bastianelli and La dissonanm see Barile, in Montale, Quaderno genovese, p. 139. 10. Eugenio Montale, Auto da fe (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966), pp. 113, 111 (from a piece dated 1949), and 244 respectively. On this problem see the ample treatment by James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Region Between Poetry and Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). 11. Montale, SuIh poesia, p. 144. 12. Ibid., p. 565. 13. Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). 14. Marzio Pieri, Biografia della poesia (Parma: Edizioni della Pilotta, 1980), p. 251: "How much Debussy in the young Mon­ tale!" Interestingly, in his Storia delh poesia italiana del Novecento (Milan: Mursia, 1976), pp. 224-25, Silvio Ramat describes the structure of Ossi di seppia as "a harmonization" between the reci­ tative of the short compositions and the "cantato" of "Mediterraneo." 15. Eugenio Montale, L'opera in versi, ed. G. Contini and R. Bettarini (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), p. 913, and Quaderno genovese, pp. 37—38: "Last Tuesday the excellent Malchiodi, who is

Notes to Chapter One | 121 going to be a lieutenant in the artillery corps, came to visit me. He played three pieces by Debussy ("Minuet," "Jardins sous Ia pluie," and "En Bateau"). The first two are superlative, the third mediocre." Barile has interesting remarks on Montale's musical aspects. She notes that Farfalla di Dinard is filled with "cavatinas, F-sharps, B-flats, and tenor embroideries," and points out that the poet "frequently and explicitly mentions certain musical forms or phrases, such as farandole, fandango, fantasia, and motet," in Montale, "Tre articoli ritrovati," p. 10. Of course the list could be lengthened. 16. Montale, Auto da fe, p. 301, from "Per fortuna siamo in ritardo" of 1963. I do not necessarily agree with his limiting judgment about the "macchiaioli" painters. 17. Montale, Sulla poesia, p. 57. 18. Ibid., p. 265; see also pp. 266-67. tg. Also in Prime alia Scala (e.g., p. 265), Puccini is interpreted in a modern dimension, filled with possibilities and restlessness, in line with recent contributions such as Enzo Siciliano, Puccini (Milan: Longanesi, 1977); Mosco Carner, Puccini: A Critical Biography (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977); and Mario Bortolotto, Consacrazione della casa (Milan: Adelphi, 1982), pp. 131—51. 20. See Sulla poesia, p. 603: "I believe that my poetry is the most 'musical' of my time (and even of earlier times). Much more than [Giovanni] Pascoli's and Gabriele [D'Annunzio]'s. I am not claiming I have done more and better than them. Music was added to D'Annunzio by Debussy." 21. Nicholas Ruwet, Langage, musique, poesie (Paris: Seuil, 1972). P- 44· 22. Guido Salvetti, Il Novecento I, vol. 9 of Storia della Musica, under the auspices of Societa Italiana di Musicologia (Turin: EDT, ig77), p. 43. A notation by Montale should be emphasized, concerning those years and the developments of the "new music": "Having abolished the dominant, excluded thematization (which privileges certain notes above others), granted the principle that in a composition any note is always a beginning and an end, and that the center should be everywhere and nowhere, musicians teach poets, and the latter accept the lesson," in Sulla poesia, p. 239. For a fascinating portrait of Paris, the city that was in part Debussy's milieu, see Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885-1918 (New York: Vintage, 1968), with its parallel

122 I Notes to Chapter One biographies of Henri Rousseau, Eric Satie, Alfred Jarry, and Guillaume Apollinaire. 23. Bortolotto, Consacrazione delh casa, p. 69. On the subject see also the beautiful catalogue Debussy e il svmbolismo, ed. G. Cogeval and F. Lesure (Rome: Palombi, 1984), with its rich iconographic and documentary materials. 24. Pierre Boulez, Releves d'apprenti (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 346. 25. Robert P. Morgan, "Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism," Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (Mar. 1984), p. 443. 26. Bortolotto, Consacrazione della casa, p. 74, and Salvetti, Il Novecento /, p. 45. 27. Boulez, Releves d'apprenti, pp. 345—46. 28. Salvetti, IlNovecento I, p. 46. Massimo MiIa agrees with this critical categorization in Breve storia della musica (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 358; Stefan Jarocinski, on the contrary, rejects the terms "impressionism" (as mistaken) and "symbolism" (as insufficient), for a definition of the composer, in Debussy: Impressionismo e simbolumo, Italian trans. (Fiesole: Discanto, 1980). Even Debussy refused these terms, for instance in his Ai. Croche, autodilettante; however, they maintain their cultural and historical usefulness, which should not be neglected, especially in relation to the young Montale—and the same is true of the concept of dissonance itself. 29. On the social and technical characteristics of Wagner's music see the fundamental essay by Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, tr. R. Livingstone (London: NLB, 1981); for a broader outlook see Alfred Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era (New York: Norton, 1947)30. Salvetti, Il Novecento I, p. 46. Boulez notes that "the epoch when he lived compelled Debussy to find at times elusive, feline solutions" (Releves d'apprenti, p. 347), and it is significant that Bortolotto, too, praises "the shrewdness, the catlike prudence" displayed by Debussy, who "smoothes the too harsh linkage of notes" and produces a "harmonic softening" (Consacrazione della casa, pp. 88—89). In any case, in musical historiography it is precisely the concept of the purity of sounds that is outlined as characterizing Debussy. For instance, already Paul Claudel emphasizes impressionistically the "diaprure" in the music of "Ie Claude national," in Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, i960), vol. 17, L'oeil ecoute, p. 150. In a more modern manner, Jarocinski insists

Notes to Chapter One | 123 upon "the sound thought" entirely directed toward the liberation of the purity, not the nuance, of sounds (Debussy, passim). Piero Rattalino also notes that in Debussy "the timbres are not fused, but simply coexist, and the sense of a hierarchy of values between melody and accompaniment is lost in favor of a co-presence of numerous independent sounds," in Storia del pianoforte (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1982), pp. 272-73. 31. Salvetti, Il Novecento I, pp. 46—47. See also Bernstein, The Unanswered Question, pp. 147—89, and Bortolotto, Consacrazione delta casa, p. 89, who considers the leitmotivs in Pelleas "not structural as in Wagner, but psychological and atmospheric." Melody is the "organizing force" of Debussy and the "musical counterpart" to the winding line of Art Nouveau, according to Arthur Wenk, Claude Debussy and the Poets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 180 and 186—87. On the same topic see also Ruwet, Langage, musique, poesie, pp. 70-99 ("Note sur les duplications dans l'oeuvre de Claude Debussy"), and Jarocinski, Debussy, pp. 157, 164, and 195. 32. Bernstein, The Unanswered Question, pp. 243—45, 249, and 259· 33. Respectively Salvetti, Il Novecento I, pp. 51 and 53, and Jacques Riviere, Etudes (Paris: Gallimard, 1944), pp. 131 and 1 3 3 34. For his part, Montale noted that Debussy was "a great musician above all when he discovered the piano on his own, with a prodigious immersion into the civilization of his country, from Rameau-Couperin to Monet and Renoir," in Prime alia Scala, p. 13

' 34. Salvetti, Il Novecento I, p. 54: "Let us remember the titles: for five fingers, for the thirds, for the fourths, for the sixths, for the octaves, for eight fingers; for chromatic degrees, for the embellishments," and so on and so forth. 35. Jarocinski, Debussy, p. 193. Bortolotto, Consacrazione della casa, pp. 90-91, stresses a consonance between Debussy and Baudelaire. 36. Boulez, Releves d'apprenti, p. 347. 37. Montale, Prime alia Scala, p. 239. 38. On this subject see Montale, "Tre articoli ritrovati," particularly his review of Georges Duhamel's and Charles Vidrac's Notes sur la technique pottique, pp. 5-6, where he is interested in the theory of "that subspecies of free verse called 'white verse': to

124 I Notes to Chapter One be clear, a verse concerned with the intrinsic rather than external musicality, with a greater adherence to the nuances of spiritual life, and with a certain pathetic aridity which would be capable, more than the faux expres rhythm of the early symbolists, of suggesting the echoes and fancies of intelligence." We should note such expressions as "greater adherence," which will be taken u p again in the imaginary interview of 1946 in a different context, or "aridity" and "intelligence," which are true self-definitions of Montale's poetry. See also Barile's comments, ibid., pp. 7—8, and in Montale, Quaderno genovese, p. 108 (the references are to Montale, Sullapoesia, pp. 111—17): T h e theme of the autonomy of aesthetic reality, connected with the two poles of decadentism, will be central in the development of Montale's poetry. On the one hand there are the lyric poets of "the pure intuitive flashes," the Coleridge of Kubla Khan and the Rimbaud of Illuminations—the line where Ungaretti belongs; and on the other hand there is a poetry which does not give up "the structural-rational cement" rejected by the former poets, but justifies it, in terms of poetic results, with the "deepening of musical values." 39. Montale, Sulla poesia, p. 58. 40. Ibid., p. 581. On the importance of Browning see at least the comments by Barile in Montale, "Tre articoli ritrovati," pp. 13—16. On Baudelaire's modernity see in particular Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking, 1971), pp. 41—46, on Baudelaire and myths in film, pp. 47—55, on the figures of the military and the woman, and pp. 56—60, on the dandy. See also Ezio Raimondi, "Prefazione," in Charles Baudelaire, Scritti sull'arte, Italian trans. (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), p. xiv: "Among the constant themes recurring throughout Baudelaire's critical meditations like a wide spiral, . . . the sharpest and boldest idea is undoubtedly that of modernity." This essay is now reprinted, with the title "Il romanzo nelle figure," in his Il volto nelle parole (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988), pp. 23—80. Born in 1924, Raimondi studied at Bologna with Carlo Calcaterra and Roberto Longhi. Holder of the chair of Italian literature at the University of Bologna, he is perhaps the foremost contemporary Italian critic and certainly one of the most informed and open minds, interested in theoretical, methodologi-

Notes to Chapter One | 125 cal, historical, stylistic, and cultural issues and problems. Among his numerous critical works: Tecniche detia critica letteraria, Metafora e storia, Politica e commedia, Il silenzio delh Gorgone, and Il volto nelle parole. His essay "Language and the Hermeneutic Adven­ ture in Literature" appeared in Forum Italicum i8, no. ι (Spring 1984), pp. 3-25. 41. Also according to Arnold Schonberg, the emancipation of dissonance as the elimination of the harmonic base is the foun­ dation of dodecaphony: Stile e idea, Italian trans. (Milan: Rusconi e Paolazzi, 1960), pp. 109—10. What for Theodor Adorno, in his Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blowster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), is an insoluble con­ trast between Stravinsky and Schonberg, between tonal and atonal music, becomes more appropriately for Bernstein (in the last part of The Unanswered Question) a dialectic relationship indispensable for understanding the pathos and vitality of twen­ tieth-century music. 42. T h e Italian critic and poet, Sergio Solmi, spoke of "the ground of radical modernity" in which the early poetry of Montale grew, "La poesia di Montale," in Scrittori negli anni (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1963), p. 285. Solmi also suggests a line Heine-Laforgue-Govoni, to which Aldo Palazzeschi is added by Lanfranco Caretti in "Un inedito montaliano [Suonatina di pianoforte]," Paragone 336 (1978), p. 5. 43. Jarocinski, Debussy, p. 178. T h e importance of the sea and the comparison with T u r n e r are also treated by Wenk, Debussy and the Poets, pp. 205—10, who quotes an interesting letter by De­ bussy, absolutely opposed to the term "impressionism" used by the "imbeciles" to define Turner, "Ie plus beau createur de mystere qui soit en art." 44. Cf. Marco Forti, Eugenio Montale (Milan: Mursia, 1973); Edoardo Sanguined, Ideologia e linguaggio (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1965); and Silvio Ramat, Montale (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965). 45. All the quotations refer to the critical edition of Montale, L'opera in versi, pp. 765-72. 46. Montale, L'opera in versi, p. 866; the text of the poem is on P- 14· 47. Montale, Quaderno genovese, pp. 33—34· Barile's comment (ibid., pp. 138—39) is worth quoting extensively: " T h e novelty of Debussy's music that most struck Montale at that time [1917] was

126 I Notes to Chapter One not so much his conception of harmony as a factor of expression valuable in itself; rather, it was his use of dissonance (the final 'white key, dissonant and jarring'), that is his refusal to resolve the dissonance in a subsequent consonance." A remark on p. 140 is also important: "Even if Debussy's music was the means through which Montale entered the core of decadent poetics and of the great themes of twentieth-century irrationalism, nevertheless it remains just a moment, which was soon superseded by the poet." 48. Massimo MiIa, L'esperienza musicale e I'estetica (Turin: Einaudi, 1956), p. 180. Cf. Rattalino, Storia del pianoforte, pp. 324— 25: among the great contemporary pianists, Gieseking was one of the first to include Debussy "constantly and frequently" in his repertoire. 49. Jarocinski, Debussy, p. 168. 50. Cf. Wenk, Debussy and the Poets, pp. 19—23. 51. An interesting connection in this cultural area is proposed by Dario Corno, "Petruska e Montale: Per una semiotica dei personaggi," Strumenti critici 39—40 (Oct. 1979), pp. 301—21. 52. Jean Starobinski, Portrait de Vartiste en saltimbanque (Geneve: Skira, 1970). On Aldo Palazzeschi see Fausto Curi, Perdita d'aureola (Turin: Einaudi, 1977); Guido Guglielmi, L'udienza del poeta (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), especially for the references to Starobinski, Baudelaire, and Freud (pp. 18—52 and 53—88); Piero Pieri, Ritratto del saltimbanco da giovane: Palazzeschi, 1905—1914 (Bologna: Patron, 1980); and Mario Luzi, Discorso naturale (Milan: Garzanti, 1984), p. 22. 53. Silvio Ramat, Protonovecento (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1978), p. 486; and Forti, Montale, p. 82. 54. Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," pp. 155-56. Luzi, Discorso naturale, p. 23, remarks that "a squared irony" corrodes "even the residue of desperation of the poet-Pierrot" and reestablishes a "fundamental equalization between him and the world." 55. L'opera in versi, p. 11. 56. See Jarocinski, Debussy, p. 173. 57. L'opera in versi, p. 722. On this subject see the chapter "Le reazioni di Montale," in Annalisa Cima and Cesare Segre, eds., Eugenio Montale (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), p. 196: questioned

Notes to Chapter One | 127 whether he translated "bugle" with "suono di corno" instead of "buccina" or "fanfara" because the latter terms denote alarm (as Marisa Bulgheroni had suggested, ibid., pp. 98-99), Montale replied: "Perhaps 'suono di corno' sounded better for me than other possible synonyms; and among the many types of horns, I could have thought of the English horn: it produces a certain lament which would go well here. Anyway, often it happens that mistakes are felicitous." 58. L'opera in versi, p. 5. It is to be noted that the wind enters domineeringly the very first poems of the young Montale, as can be documented by these 1917 entries in his Quaderno genovese, pp. 14 and 50: "Il vento fischia I gli alberi si confondono in mischia" (The wind whistles / the trees are confused in a struggle) and "Impressione: Le sonagliere del vento squillano tra gli alberi primaverili" (Impression: The bells of the wind peal amidst the spring trees); beside the wind, "alberi" will be found again in "Corno inglese" and "sonagliere" in "Falsetto." On the themewords of "In limine" see the comprehensive essay by Emerico Giachery, " 'In limine' e la metamorfosi dell'orto," in Letture montaliane in occasione dell'8o° compleanno del Poeta, ed. Comune e Provincia di Genova (Genoa: Bozzi, 1977), pp. 17-38; on p. 27 there is an important reference to Luigi Rosiello, "Analisi statistica della funzione poetica nella poesia montaliana," in his Struttura, uso e funzioni detta lingua (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965), pp. 115—47; the table with the first 100 theme-words in Montale (in which the wind is in thirty-second place) is on pp. 138—39. 59. See the anthropological interpretation (after Victor Turner) by Rebecca West, Eugenio Montale, Poet on the Edge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), and the deconstructive (Derridean) one by Stefano Agosti, Cinque analisi: Il testo della poesia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), especially pp. 83—84. We should at least recall Victor Turner's The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969) and Drama, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), both of which develop the classic Arnold Van Gennep, Les rites de passage (Paris: Nourry, 1909). 60. See Juri Lotman and Boris Uspensky, Tipologia della cultura, Italian trans. (Milan: Bompiani, 1975), pp. 145—81. 61. M. H. Abrams, "The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor," in the anthology he edited, English Romantic Poets:

128 J Notes to Chapter One Modern Essays in Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, !975)' PP- 37 _ 54· This essay develops an idea Abrams had already proposed in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 51. 62. Abrams, "The Correspondent Breeze," pp. 37—38, 48, and 51· 63. In relation to the problems of tradition on the one hand and of lyric narrativity (a la Browning) on the other, it is worth recalling the essay by Robert Langbaum, "Romanticism as a Modern Tradition," in his The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, !957)» i n particular pp. 9-37. 64. Cf. the valuable essay by Oreste Macri, "Esegesi al terzo libro di Montale," Letteratura 79—81 (Jan.—Jun. 1966), pp. 120—69. Note 8 (p. 123) on the link form-soul-sigh-fancy (from Dante and Petrarch to Wordsworth and Pound) can be a useful addition to Abrams's treatment of the romantic breeze. 65. L'opera in versi, p. 91. 66. Cf. an entry in Quaderno genovese, p. 33: "Illumination. The sun arrow of greenish light, a greyish sea that struggles on the muddy shore and trembles and shines in all its scales like a gigantic fish." 67. On the rhymes, guttural and dental alliterations, and "phonosymbolic" vowels of "Corno inglese" see also Glauco Cambon, Eugenio Montale's Poetry: A Dream in Reasons Presence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 14. Cf. also the chapter on Montale's "upupa" (hoopoe) in Giorgio Orelli, Accertamenti verbali (Milan: Bompiani, 1978), as well as his Accertamenti montaliani (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984), with his splendid analyses of the significant-signifying sounds of the Montalean texts he examines. 68. This line by Shelley is used by Abrams in "The Correspondent Breeze," p. 43. But in "Corno inglese" there is more than an echo from "Ode to the West Wind." See, for example, the movement of wind and clouds "even from the dim verge / Of the horizon to the zenith's height," a movement which becomes "The locks of the approaching storm" (lines 21-23); or "If even / I were as in my boyhood, and could be / The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven, / As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed / Scarce seemed a vision" (lines 47-51): these lines seem fully accomplished in Montale's "vision" of "nuvole in viaggio, alti Eldo-

Notes to Chapter One | 129 radi, chiari reami di lassu." Finally, I shall deal with another important connection between Shelley and Montale in chapter 3. On Montale's knowledge of the English romantic poet see Barile in Montale, Quaderno genovese, p. 131 n. 80. 69. Morton Bloomfield, "The Syncategorematic in Poetry: From Semantics to Syntactics," in his Essays and Explorations: Studies in Ideas, Language, and Literature, pp. 262—74 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 267 and 269—72. 70. Ettore Bonora, La poesia di Montale (Turin: Tirrenia, 1965), vol. 1, p. 88. Obviously I cannot agree with his evaluation of the parentheses as "soft-pedal moments" in the composition (P- 87). 71. Giusi Baldissone, Il male di scrivere: L'inconscio e Montale (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 1 n. 1, p. 123. 72. Bloomfield, "The Syncategorematic in Poetry," pp. 273— 74. Other typically syncategorematic means are repetition and deviation. 73. In dealing with this ending, Ramat, Montale, p. 22, erroneously speaks of "a nine-syllable line," but notes with subtlety that the splitting into two segments "almost signifies the congenital discord of this instrument." 74. Cf. the already quoted "Cerca una maglia rotta nella rete"; but Montale's questioning recurs throughout Ossi di seppia (one thinks of "Crisalide" and "Casa sul mare" especially), and all the way to the core of Le occasioni: "La casa dei doganieri": "Il varco e qui?"(The customs house: the opening is here?), in L'opera in versi, p. 161. 75. How intrinsically musical "Corno inglese" is can be gauged also in a comparison, which at first sight might seem secondary or even improbable, between the second line, "ricorda un forte scotere di lame" (it reminds of a strong shaking of plates), and a technical remark made by a contemporary musicologist: "The technique of building the piano . . . had developed so that the piano was no longer exactly the one used by Chopin and Liszt. T h e greater tension of the wires . . . had taken away the old sound of stricken wires and, we may add, had given it a sound of shaken plates. It is precisely here that Debussy develops a new conception not only of sound, but of music" (Rattalino, Stone del pianoforte, p. 271, italics mine).

130 I Notes to Chapter Two

Chapter Two. Ut Figura Poesis ι. Luigi Magnani, Il mio Morandi (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), p. 48. When Magnani told Montale about Morandi's praise, the poet kept silent and then commented, "You know, in Italy there are at least seven poets who are better than I am; but among the paint­ ers I believe I am the first one"; questioned who those fateful seven poets were, he shook his head, "laughing softly," almost as if underscoring the paradox of his statement. 2. On this subject see Eugenio Montale, L'opera in versi, p. 414, and Pastelli e disegni (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1966). An issue of L'Espresso-Colore 12 (Feb. 1971) contains the "Satura" poems accom­ panied by beautiful reproductions of the poet's pictorial works and by Giovanni Giudici's comments, "Le occasioni dipinte," pp. 8, 12, and 16. 3. Cambon, Eugenio Montale's Poetry, p. 226. See also other two judgments by Montale that are pertinent in this context: "I am convinced that all the arts have a common basis. It is a mistake to separate them categorically, as if they were entirely independent from one another" (Sulla poesia, p. 597); and "My drawings have anticipated my sense of humor of the later writings" (ibid., p. 607). It is worth recalling that Corrado Govoni, a poet Montale admired, used to insert drawings as an integral part of some of his "visual poems" in Rarefazioni (Milan: Edizioni di "Poesia," 1915). Sketches and drawings are also in the manuscript of Paul Valery's La jeune Parque, ed. O. Nadel (Paris: Club du meilleur livre, 1957). 4. J u r i Lotman, "Primary and Secondary CommunicationModeling Systems," in Daniel Lucid, ed., Soviet Semiotics (Balti­ more: T h e Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 95-98; and Lotman and Uspensky, passim. 5. Without going back too far in time, suffice it to mention Diderot and Lessing, Baudelaire and Ruskin, Proust and Pater, Bataille and Yeats. To give only a few contemporary examples, one thinks of the pages by Paul Claudel on Dutch and Spanish painting (L'oeil ecoute, pp. 9—48 and 58—88), and those by Andre Malraux on Goya in Saturne (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) and also on general issues in Les voix du silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1951). Processo per eresia and La putina greca by Neri Pozza (respectively Flor­ ence: Vallecchi, ig6g, and Milan: Mondadori, 1972), are stupen-

Notes to Chapter Two | 131 dous, imaginary reconstructions of the golden period of Venetian painting; in a less explicit manner, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (New York: Harper, 1927), the end of the writing of the text by the author coincides with the completion of a painting by the character Lily Briscoe. 6. Precisely because of its empiric approach, 1 am not using here an otherwise valuable book, rich with particular remarks: Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper, 1968). Svetlana and Paul Alpers have warned against the dangers of oversimplification in the comparison between literature and visual art, in "Ut Picture, Noesis} Criticism in Literary Studies and Art History," New Literary History 3, no. 3 (Spring 197a), pp. 4 3 7 58. 7. Cesare Segre speaks of "a compresence of a linguistic reading of the literary text. . . and an assimilation of its content" which occurs sentence after sentence, in Structures and Time: Narration, Poetry, Models (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. t i . On the reading of visual texts see Jean Laude, "On the Analysis of Poems and Paintings," New Literary History 3, no. 3 (Spring 1972), pp. 480—81, and Michael Baxandall, "The Language of Art History," New Literary History 10, no. 3 (Spring !979)· P- 4 6 °8. Baxandall, "The Language of Art History," p. 461. Giorgio Patrizi gives an intriguing and brilliant account of many a specimen of Italian art criticism as dominated by a "narrative principle" which, far from resolving the conflict between the iconic and the discursive, continues the primacy of the written (rational) word over the image, the figural considered at best as "a secondary rationality," in "La 'lettura' deH'arte," in Giovanni Previtali and Federico Zeri, eds., Storia dell'arte italiana (Turin: Einaudi, ig8i), part 3, vol. 3, Conservazione Faho Restauro, pp. 197—276, especially pp. 200—202. 9. Louis Marin, Etudes semiologiques: ecritures, peintures (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), and Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Dkcourse, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). All page references will be to these editions. Also Jean Louis Schefer's Scenographie d'un tableau (Paris: Seuil, 1971) should be considered in the same perspective from which I discuss Marin.

132 I Notes to Chapter Two 10. Louis Marin's analysis of "Et in Arcadia Ego" is in his Detruire h peinture (Paris: Galilee, 1977)11. See also Jacques Derrida, La verite en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), particularly "Restitution de la verite en pointure" (pp. 285—305). Derrida starts from the polemic of the art critic Meyer Schapiro with Heidegger's The Origin of Painting on the "attribution" of two boots in a Van Gogh painting and proceeds to question such fundamental notions as matter, form, thing, product, and subject. A philosophical discussion of Lyotard (as well as Derrida and De Man) is in Rodolphe Gasche, "Deconstruction as Criticism," Glyph 6 (1979), pp. 177—215. 12. Wolfgang Iser, "The Current Situation of Literary Theory: Key Concepts and the Imaginary," New Literary History 11, no. 1 (Autumn 1979), p. 18. 13. Gilbert Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de I'lmaginaire (Paris: PUF, 1963). All page references will be to the Italian edition, Le strutture antropologiche deU'immaginario (Bari: Dedalo, 1972)14. See E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), especially pp. 285—305, on the "sequentiality" of figurative reading and on the possible analogies between music and drawing (the tonal system is somehow analogous to perspective, while melody can be compared with realistic representation). 15. Rudolf Arnheim, "A Plea for Visual Thinking," Critical Inquiry 6, no. 3 (Spring 1980), pp. 489—97, which follows his Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Pierre Francastel, Le figure et Ie lieu: I'ordre vnuel du Quattrocento (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), and La sociologie de I'art et sa vocation interdisciphnaire: I'oeuvre et I'influence de Pierre Francastel (Paris: Denoel/ Gonthier, 1976). 16. W.J.T. Mitchell, "Spatial Form in Literature," Critical Inquiry 6, no. 3 (Spring 1980), pp. 541 and 560-61. The essay is reprinted, with the subtitle "Toward a General Theory," in the volume edited by Mitchell, The Language of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 271-99. 17. Marc-Eli Blanchard, Description: Sign, Self, Desire: Critical Theory in the Wake of Semiotics (The Hague: Mouton, 1980), especially pp. 4—5 and 17—19. See also the recent overview by Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Mod-

Notes to Chapter Two | 133 ern Literature and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 18. J u r i Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), p. 217; more generally, Omar Calabrese, ed., Semiotica detta pittura (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980). 19. On the importance of history in general see Segre, Struc­ tures and Time, passim; and in particular see Laude, "Analysis," p. 483: "Poetry and painting constitute series which, each one taken separately, are linked not to each other but to an identical se­ quence of a common cultural area. . . . To relate poetry to paint­ ing means, first of all, to restrict oneself to a historical area be­ yond which one risks posing problems only in an abstract way." Also Svetlana and Paul Alpers, "Ut Pictura Noesis}" p. 449, stress the point that the important differences are not among arts, but among cultural epochs. 20. On La Voce and La Ronda see Giorgio Luti, Cronache letterarie tra Ie due guerre, 1920-1940 (Bari: Laterza, 1966), pp. 9—43; on the relationship between La Ronda and Valori plastici (or be­ tween classicism and traditionalism on the one hand, and meta­ physical painting on the other), there are important remarks in Riccardo Scrivano, " 'La Ronda' e i rondisd," in Letteratura italiana contemporanea (Rome: Lucarini, 1980), pp. 41-82. Cf. also Paolo Fossati, "Valori plastici" 1918-1922 (Turin: Einaudi, 1982). 21. For example, in Roberto Longhi there is a typical under­ statement: "Morandi will be considered second to no one," in Da Cimabue a Morandi (Milan: Mondadori, 1973), p. 1102. Giulio Carlo Argan defines Morandi as "undoubtedly the greatest Ital­ ian painter of this century" and "the only one that can be said to be truly European," in L'arte moderna, ιηηο-ΐ9']ο (Florence: Sansoni, 1970), p. 455. Roberto Longhi (1890-1970), one of the most influential art critics in Italy, knew and appreciated Morandi from the beginning. He taught at the universities of Rome, Bo­ logna, and Florence. He founded the prestigious journal Paragone, devoted to both arts and literature, which was carried on after his death by his wife, the writer Anna Band. Some of his works remain fundamental: Piero della Francesca, Officinaferrarese, Il Caravaggio, and Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana. A valuable anthology, edited by Gianfranco Condni, is appropri­ ately titled Da Cimabue a Morandi.

134 J Notes to Chapter Two 22. Montale, Sulla poesia, p. 256. 23. Maurizio Calvesi, La metafiska schiarita: Da De Chirico a Carta, da Morandi a Savinio (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982), pp. 76—82. 24. On this subject see the analysis by Fausto Montanari, "Alia maniera di Filippo De Pisis nell'inviargli questo libro," in Letture montaliane, pp. 121-25, and Calvesi's pages on Carra's "metaphysics" based on the "recovery of the object" and wholly distinct from De Chirico's (La metafiska schiarita, p. 216). 25. T h e most sympathetic witness of the Anni con Giorgio Morandi, Giuseppe Raimondi, is also the coeditor (with G. Bonsanti) of Vincenzo Cardarelli's Opere complete (Milan: Mondadori, 1962), as well as the author of the essay "La congiuntura metafiska Morandi-Carra," in Paragone 2, no. ig (1951). Sergio Solmi speaks of Cardarelli's "desperate classicism" in Scrittori negh anni, p. 207. T h e anastatic reprinting of Il sole a picco is now available (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1984), with a note by Stefano Calabrese, "Morandismo di Cardarelli." 26. Italo Calvino, "Main Currents in Italian Fiction Today," Italian Quarterly 4, no. 13-14 (Spring-Summer ig6o), p. 6. It is interesting to note that in the Italian version, which appeared in Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e societa (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), Calvino adds Ungaretti to the previous selection (p. 4g). 27. Francesco Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1968), p. 181. All page references will be to this edition. Francesco Arcangeli (1915—1974) was perhaps the most talented and certainly the most generous of Longhi's disciples, and succeeded him on the chair of history of art at the University of Bologna. He remains the best interpreter of Morandi (his 1968 monograph is a touchstone), and his essays on modern and contemporary painting, collected in two volumes under the title Dal Romanticismo all'informale (From Turner to Pollock) are equally stimulating and fascinating. A few of his pages are available in English as "Wiligelmus: Body and Nature in Romanesque Art," Italian Quarterly 16, no. 62-63 (Fall-Winter 1962), pp. 3-16. 28. See n. 3, chapter 1; see also Vittorio Strada, "Dialogo con Bachtin," Intersezioni 1, no. 1 (April 1980), pp. 115—24. 29. See Hans Robert Jauss, "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory," New Literary History 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1970), pp. 7—37, and Rien T. Segers, "An Interview with Hans Robert Jauss," New Literary History g, no. 1 (Autumn 1979), pp. 83—95.

Notes to Chapter Two | 135 30. It should be noted that I am not positing temporal limits for Morandi's works. The etchings I have chosen are mostly from 1912 to 1934; one is from 1942 and one from 1956, while all the Ossi di seppia poems are from 1916 to 1928. However, in cultural terms, both artists belong indisputably to the same "period," which may include temporal oscillations or notable delays between different art forms. 31. Marin, Detruire la peinture, pp. 92—93. On the origins of the still life as a genre see E. H. Gombrich, Meditations on a HobbyHorse (London: Phaidon, 1978), pp. 95-105; on the interpretive problems specific to this genre see Marc-Eli Blanchard, "Natures mortes: Pour une theorie de la designation en peinture," Communications 34 (1981), pp. 41—60, and Norman Bryson, "Chardin and the Text of Still Life," Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989), pp. 227-52. 32. Longhi, Da Cimabue a Morandi, p. 1098; see also Sergio Solmi, Pittori di ieri e di oggi (Milan: Ferrania, 1949), p. 92: the "accidental" of a natural impression is juxtaposed with "the absolute" of the stylistic definition; and Joan M. Lukach, "Giorgio Morandi, 20th Century Modern: Toward a Better Understanding of his Art, 1910 to 1943," in Giorgio Morandi: An Exhibition Organized by the Des Moines Art Center, pp. 19—39 (Exh. cat., Des Moines Art Center, 1981), pp. 35 and 37: "Pushing his objects to the point of abstraction, but never quite destroying them," Morandi used them "as compositional elements, . . . nearly as abstract and non-literary as the geometric forms in the works Kandinsky painted in the same years." Analogously Kenneth Baker, "Redemption Through Painting: Late Works of Morandi," ibid., pp. 41—45, writes on p. 42: "It was not these things that mattered to the artist, but their way of providing a pretext for representation." 33. Cf. Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, "L'occhio che accarezzava pared vegetali," La Repubblica, Aug. 18, 1978, p. 19: "Toward the end of the twenties Morandi begins to besiege the form of things to the point of disfiguring it, and sinks it into the tragic clot of a desolate matter"; his art "continues to speak about painting but at the same time about a human condition of existence." 34. Francesco Arcangeli, Dal Romanticismo all'informale (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 262.

136 I Notes to Chapter Two 35. Lamberto Vitali, L'opera grafica di Giorgio Morandi (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), p. 22. 36. Arcangeli, Dal Romanticismo all'informale, p. 270. 37. On the thematic aspects of Morandi's etchings see one of the very few essays on the subject, clearly written and persuasive: Amy Namowitz Worthen, "Giorgio Morandi as an Etcher," in Giorgio Morandi: An Exhibition Organized by the Des Moines Art Center, pp. 47-55, in particular pp. 47-50. On the "Bolognese tradition" of the network see Calvesi, La metafisica schianta, p. 2 21. We should also remember the precedent of Rembrandt, who used to paint by employing the technique of etching: see Henri Focillon, Vie des formes (Paris: PUF, 1964). 38. Vitali, L'opera grafica di Giorgio Morandi, already quoted. 39. Cf. Durand, Le strutture antropologiche, part 2, chapter 3, pp. 26gff. Besides repetition-variation of a theme, the mystical structures of the imaginary include the "viscosity" of style (which tends to "glue" together disparate elements of experience), sensorial realism, and a tendency to miniaturize or "Gulliverize" representation. All have in common the emphasis on intimacy, typical of the "nocturnal regimen" of the imaginary. 40. Namowitz Worthen, "Giorgio Morandi as an Etcher," p. 51, italics mine. 41. Vitali, L'opera grafica di Giorgio Morandi, p. 21. 42. Namowitz Worthen, "Giorgio Morandi as an Etcher," p. 53· 43. Wallace Stevens, "The Relations Between Poetry and Painting," in The Necessary Angel: Essays in Reality and Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1951), p. 166. 44. Namowitz Worthen, "Giorgio Morandi as an Etcher," p. 53. It is interesting to note that other critics have also pointed out the distance in certain works by Morandi and their optical effect. For instance, for Robert Hughes the thin bottlenecks vaguely recall the towers of Bologna and San Gimignano ("Master of Unfussed Clarity," Time, Dec. 21, 1981, pp. 58—59); similarly, for Renato Barilli, "bottles, boxes, teapots, etc., become a wall in front of us, stand like buildings, walled towers, fortresses—thus he succeeds in organizing the surrounding territory with extreme precision" ("Un grattacielo in bottiglia," L'Espresso, Aug. 20, 1978, P- 55)· 45. Vitali, L'opera grafica di Giorgio Morandi, p. 20.

Notes to Chapter Two | 137 46. Vitali, L'opera grafica di Giorgio Morandi, p. 16. See also his Morandi: Catalogo generate (Milan: Electa, 1977), p. 12: "The same, constant need to proceed by variations of few, exclusive, essential themes, which led the artist to become almost morbidly fond of some humble objects . . . explains as well his predilection for the landscape of Grizzana and its subdued, almost hidden beauty." See also his other important contribution, Giorgio Morandi pittore (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1965). 47. See Cesare Brandi, Morandi lungo it cammino (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970), p. 13. This book takes up his preceding Giorgio Morandi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1942 and 1953)- $ e e a l s o Giuseppe Marchiori, Arte e artisti d'avanguardia in Italia (1910—1950) (Milan: Edizioni di Comunita, i960), pp. 106-16. 48. Cf. Longhi, Da Cimabue a Morandi, p. iog6 (a "preferential list" by Morandi includes: "Giotto, Masaccio, Piero, Bellini, Titian, Chardin, Corot, Renoir, Cezanne"); and Argan, L'arte moderna, pp. 455 and 598—602: "Mondrian begins with empirical space, the environment, and arrives at a theoretical space; Morandi starts with a theoretical space and arrives at concrete space, the environmental unit. Paradoxically, in modern painting Mondrian is Paolo Uccello, Morandi is Vermeer"(p. 598). One is also tempted to attribute to Morandi some remarks by Claudel: in Dutch painting (especially in Vermeer) he sees "the image of thought which closes upon its possessions," and he considers light in Rembrandt as "the support and an emanation of thought" (L'oeil ecoute, pp. 21 and 41). 49. Svetlana and Paul Alpers, "Ut Pictura Noesis?" p. 458, explain that the tone of voice implies the presence of a person who speaks, while no aspect of painting suggests the presence of a painter so decisively. 50. Francesco Arcangeli, " 'Tempo' indimenticabile," Letteratura 79-81 (Jan.—Jun. 1966), pp. 255-56. But in Morandi, too, the use of time, corresponding to the variations of natural light, is a "tacit theme"; see Baker, "Redemption Through Painting," PP- 43-44· 51. Montale, L'opera in versi, p. 9. All quotations from Ossi di seppia are from this edition. 52. See Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, "Da D'Annunzio a Montale," in Ricerche sulla lingua poetica contemporanea, pp. 161—259 (Padua: Liviana, 1966), now in La tradizione del Novecento (Milan: Feltri-

138 I Notes to Chapter Two nelli, 1975); Piero Bonfiglioli, "Pascoli, Gozzano, Montale e la poesia dell'oggetto," Il Verri 2, no. 4 (1958), pp. 34-54; and Arshi Pipa, Montale and Dante (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968). 53. Glauco Cambon, Eugenio Montale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), p. 7; "the etching-like quality of Montale's style" is briefly noted on p. 20. Mengaldo, too, speaks of Montale's "conquest of an inner, geometric, Morandian form of things" ("Da D'Annunzio a Montale," p. 252, in connection with Montale's "desperate rationalism" as well as the esprit de geometric in contemporary poetry). 54. Gianfranco Contini, Una lunga fedelta (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), p. 11. Born in 1912, Contini is an Italian critic who combines a rigorous philological preparation with an exquisite stylistic judgment and elegant writing of his own. Among the first to appreciate Montale's poetry, his "long fidelity" dates back to 1933. Perhaps his best-known and most valuable volume of literary criticism is Varianti e altra linguistica, in which his philological method of collating and systematically comparing all the different drafts and variations of a given text achieves refined critical results. 55. In a letter by Montale quoted in Alvaro Valentini, Lettura di Montale: Ossi di seppia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1971), p. 11. 56. Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry, Eugenio Montale: The Private Language of Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977). P- 3257. Giacomo Debenedetti, Poesia italiana del Novecento (Milan: Garzanti, 1974), pp. 27-40. Debenedetti (1901-1967) was a writer and chronicler who exerted a quiet influence on Italian criticism as a critico militante or free-lancer (see his three volumes of critical essays, Saggi critici, and at least Il personaggio-uomo). In the last years of his life he taught at the universities of Messina and Rome, and his lessons are now collected in such books as Il romanzo del Novecento, Poesia del Novecento, and Verga e il naturalismo. His broad European background and his interest in Jungian and Freudian psychology were models for generations of Italian students. 58. Almansi and Merry, Eugenio Montale, p. 32. 59· I b i d 60. Nicolas J. Perella, Midday in Italian Literature: Variations on

Notes to Chapter Three | 139 an Archetypal Theme (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 242. 61. Durand, Le strutture antropologiche, p. 27a (Arnheim's "visual thinking" and Francastel's "figurative thinking" should also be kept in mind). Mengaldo, "Da D'Annunzio a Montale," p. 257, speaks of Montale's "rather closed repertoire of structures of the imaginary (metaphoric nuclei, images, and above all their contextual associations)"; these structures originate "a certain 'thematic monotony' and the constant reference to a numbered series of extralinguistic archetypes." Durand's categories provide just these extralinguistic archetypes and define them with precision. 62. T h e reference is obviously to Rebecca West, Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge. 63. Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, i960), p. 370; and Morton Bloomfield, "The Syncategorematic in Poetry." 64. Gerard Genette, "Metonymie chez Proust," in Figures III, pp. 41-63 (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 48. 65. Montale, Sulla poesia, p. 565; see also p. 88: "Eastern Liguria—the land where I spent part of my youth—has a meager, harsh, hallucinating beauty. Instinctively I tried a poetry that would adhere to every fiber of that land: and not without results, if a famed critic (Emilio Cecchi) immediately noticed that in my book [Ossi di seppia] everything happened as if under a veil of hallucination. Later on, in an imaginary interview, I tried to give a philosophical explanation of that fact."

Chapter Three. Strategies of the Antihero 1. Montale, SuIh poesia, pp. 105—6. 2. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, ed., Poeti italiani del Novecento (Milan: Mondadori, 1978), pp. xxiii-xxiv and 527. T h e differences between the novel and lyric poetry are discussed by Cesare Segre, Teatro e romanzo (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), pp. 103—18, especially p. 115. 3. Romano Luperini, "Il 'significato' di 'Mediterraneo,' " L'ombra d'Argo 1, nos. 1—2 (1983), pp. 25 and 47. 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Epic and the Novel," in The Dialogic Imag-

140 I Notes to Chapter Three ination, pp. 3—40, on p. 39; the following quotations are on pp. 35 and 255. See The Hero in Literature, ed. Victor Brombert (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Premier, 1969), pp. 11—21 and passim; and Hero/ Anti-hero, ed. R. B. Rollin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973). 6. Robert Torrance, The Comic Hero (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); David Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970); Peter L. Hays, The Limping Hero: Grotesques in Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1971); and Bernard Schilling, 7 ¾ Hero as Failure: Balzac and the Rubempre Cycle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 7. Montale, Auto dafe, p. 168. 8. Luigi Pirandello, L'umorhmo, in Saggi, poesie, scritti vari, ed. Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti, pp.15—160 (Milan: Mondadori, i960), pp. 158—60. On p. 130, Tristram Shandy is described as "a knot of variations and digressions." g. In a review dated 1949, "Due artisti di ieri," Montale cites Chamisso as an example of the historical influence of a classic, Sulfa poesia, p. 264; for another example, see his comments on Puccini and Gozzano quoted in chapter 1 in a different context. 10. Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. R. H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978). 11. Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, pp. 79-81; but see the whole chapter that gives the title to the book, pp. 67—90. 12. See Marina Beer, "Alcune note su Ettore Schmitz e i suoi nomi," in Contributi sveviani, with a preface by Riccardo Scrivano (Triest: Lint, 1979), pp. 11—30. Cf. also the well-known pages on Svevo's Jewishness by Giacomo Debenedetti in Saggi critici, nuova serie (Milan: Mondadori, 1955), pp. 89-94, and his more recent Il romanzo del Novecento (Milan: Garzanti, 1971), pp. 516—616 and 624. There are useful contributions in Giuseppe A. Camerino, "Il concetto d'inettitudine in Svevo e Ie sue implicazioni mitteleuropee ed ebraiche," Lettere italiane 25 (1973), pp. 190-213; Brian Moloney, "Svevo as a Jewish Writer," Italian Studies 28 (1973), pp. 52—65; and Enrico Ghidetti, Italo Svevo: La coscienza di un borghese triestino (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1980), pp. 30-40. 13. Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, tr. Beryl De Zoete (New York: Vintage, 1958), pp. 144-45.

Notes to Chapter Three | 141 14. Giacomo Debenedetti, Il personaggio-uomo (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1970), pp. 70—71 and 36-37. We should recall that perhaps not by chance "inameno" (dreary) is the same adjective used by Longhi to describe Morandi's etched and painted landscapes, while "falotici" (extravagant) and "atona" (atonic) are typical of Montale's poetry. 15. Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965), p. 64. 16. Debenedetti, Il personaggo-uomo, p. 81. 17. Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, p. 55. On the historical-literary models see Walter Reed, Meditations on the Hero: A Study of the Romantic Hero in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 18. Morse Peckham, The Triumph of Romanticism (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1970). On alienation in general see Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). 19. Karl Marx, Capital, ed. Friedrich Engels, tr. S. Moore and E. Aveling (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952). T h e critical literature on this topic is extremely broad. I shall limit myself to pointing out a few titles: George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Atheneum, 1982), pp. 325—47 (among other things, Georg Lukacs is defined "the true predecessor of Walter Benjamin," p. 331); Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); and Gustavo Costa, "Vico and Marx: Notes on the History of the Concept of Alienation," in Giorgio Tagliacozzo, ed., Vico and Marx: Affinities and Contrasts (Atlantic Highlands, N J . : Humanities Press, 1983), pp. 151—62. 20. Georg Simmel, The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), in particular pp. 42—43, for the concepts of alienation and fetishism (from the 1911 essay "On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture") and pp. 47—67 ("A Chapter in the Philosophy of Value"). Cf. also a meaningful note by Bakhtin on this topic: "Literature is an inseparable part of the totality of culture and cannot be studied outside the total cultural context. It cannot be severed from the rest of culture and related directly (bypassing culture) to socio-economic or other factors. These factors influence culture as a whole, and only through it and in conjunction with it do they affect litera-

142 I Notes to Chapter Three ture. T h e literary process is a part of the cultural process and cannot be torn away from it" ("From Notes Made in 1970-71," in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 140). 21. Cf. Simmel, The Conflict in Modern Culture, pp. 68—80 and particularly p. 77 on "naturalism" and "stylization"; and Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, tr. M. Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 1953). 22. Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963): the importance of Worringer is discussed in particular on pp. 50-54, and it is from Worringer that the fundamental premises for "the spatial form" of modern literature are derived. WJ.T. Mitchell takes u p and broadens this concept in "Spatial Form in Literature," pp. 539-67. 23. On this topic see Peter L. Berger, "Toward a Critique of Modernity" and "Toward a Sociological Understanding of Psychoanalysis" in his Facing Up to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 70-80 and 23—34 respectively; and Robert Dombroski, Le totalita dell'artificio (Padua: Liviana, ig78), pp. 138-43 and passim. 24. Berger, "Toward a Critique of Modernity," pp. 71-73. 25. David Caute, The Illusion (New York: Harper, 1971), p. 164. 26. Douglas C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 215. 27. Ezio Raimondi, "Prefazione," p. x. 28. Paul De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Charles Singleton, ed., Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 198. It should be noted that in Baudelaire the term "folly" is always associated with the notion of "absolute comic." 29. Debenedetti, Il romanzo del Novecento, p. 419. 30. Eugenio Montale and Italo Svevo, Lettere, con gli scritti di Montale su Svevo (Bari: De Donato, 1966), p. 111. 31. In Italian the term "modernism" was originally used for a movement of religious renovation within the Catholic Church at the beginning of the century. Today the term has the same technical denotation as its English equivalent, referring to a precise movement in literature. See Robert Langbaum, The Modern Spirit:

Notes to Chapter Three | 143 Essays in the Continuity of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (New York: Viking, 1975); and, particularly important as far as an understanding of Montale is concerned, Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) and The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962). 32. Montale and Svevo, Lettere, p. 60. On p. 63 Montale replies: "I will make verse for some more years, because it is the only form I feel possible for me today. Do not be surprised that there can exist a temperament polarized in the sense of the lyric and of literary criticism: from Baudelaire to Eliot and Valery, how many had the same destiny? And then, with the experience of life I have, wholly and exclusively inner, what could I say in the narrative field? I am a tree prematurely burnt by the sirocco wind, and everything I could give—halted cries and starts—is entirely in Ossi di seppia." Cf. Mario Martelli, Il rovescio della poesia (Milan: Longanesi, 1977), p. 47: "It is clear that between 1925 and 1926 Montale was reading Svevo with the same spirit with which he had composed Ossi di seppia." Similar positions are held by Gilberto Lonardi, Il vecchio e il giovane (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980), pp. 1-32, and especially by Luperini, whose comments are worth quoting: "Montale translates his very modern discovery of a new human condition into the language of 'crepuscolare' tradition [for instance, the 'fanciullo invecchiato' of'Mediterraneo']. 'Senility' for him is a trait of 'the newest Ulysses' and is to be interpreted in the context of a culture which sees in such 'senility' the sign of a disharmony with the real, of an unrendable laceration" ("Il 'significato' di 'Mediterraneo,' " pp. 35—36). 33. Cf. Angelo Guglielmi, Ilpiacere delh letteratura (Milan: FeItrinelli, 1981), p. 17: "The fact that these three writers have dedicated the maximum of attention to problems of technique and language is not an indication of their lack of interest in reality; . . . on the contrary, it is the proof of their determination to establish a free and unconditioned rapport with reality—a rapport to be developed beyond the simple (and useless) objective of documentation and denunciation." An interesting statement by Montale should also be considered: "Pirandello? I know very well that he has turned European theatre upside down, and person-

144 I Notes to Chapter Three ally I believe him to be better than Ionesco and Beckett" (in Auto dafe, p. 325). 34. Debenedetti, Il romanzo del Novecento, pp. 3—13· In such a context, he assigns a prominent position to Federigo Tozzi—and G. A. Borgese should be added as well. 35. Caute, The Illusion, p. 102. 36. Renato Barilli, La linea Svevo-Pirandello (Milan: Mursia, 1972), pp. 13-14 and passim. 37. Berger, "Toward a Critique of Modernity," pp. 70—78. 38. Renata Minerbi Treitel, "Zeno Cosini: The Meaning Behind the Name," Italica 8, no. 2 (Summer 1971), pp. 234—45. 39. Montale, in Montale and Svevo, Lettere, pp. 116—17. 40. See Wolfang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, ig8i); Raimondi refers to Kayser in his comments on Baudelaire's "Essence du rire," when he explains that "since the grotesque has its end in itself, it produces a sort of new innocence, almost a joy that abolishes the dissonance of being degraded" ("Prefazione," p. xxv). 41. Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, p. 11. Subsequent references will be to this edition. 42. Jacques Derrida, "La pharmacie de Platon," in La dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 69—197. 43. Geno Pampaloni, "Italo Svevo," in Stona deUa letteratura italiana, ed. Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno (Milan: Garzanti, 1969), vol. 9, Il Novecento, pp. 493—532; on p. 523 Zeno's gratuitous act is "much more complex and I should say modern than Gide's," because it is "the objective condition of man in unreality"; Zeno "receives unmotivated responses from life." 44. Sandro Maxia, "Italo Svevo," in La letteratura itahana: Storia e testi, ed. Carlo Muscetta (Bari: Laterza, 1976), vol. 9, Il Novecento, pp. 505—55, on p. 548. It is interesting to note that Guido Fink linked Zeno's final page with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb should also be recalled in this context): "From the struggle of the apes with antelopes, panthers, and other primates there emerges man in a Darwinian process; from the double abolition of man and machine, perhaps, a new form of life, different and superior, will be born. If the monolith is black and shining, impenetrable, the Child has wide-open eyes; and he has undoubtedly the advantage of being free to roam at

Notes to Chapter Three | 145 will throughout a 'clean' universe which is free—but is it a consolation?—'from parasites and disease,'" "2001: Il cinema e Io spazio," Paragone 232 (June 1969), pp. 56—65, on p. 65. 45. Debenedetti, Il personaggo-uomo, p. 21. 46. Barilli, La linea Svevo-Pirandello, p. 12. But we should also recall Montale's words: "We had rarely seen a writer deprived of sermonizing and didascalic instincts," such as Svevo, who was "laborious and profound, entangled and extremely free, a writer of all times but a Triestine of his difficult years" (in Montale and Svevo, Lettere, pp. 93 and 174). 47. On this subject see Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971) and The Don Juan Legend (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)· 48. Luigi Pirandello, One, None, and a Hundred-thousand, tr. S. Putnam (New York: Dutton, 1933). Subsequent references will be to this edition. T h e quotation from the original is from Uno, nessuno e centomiL·, in Tutti i romann (Milan: Mondadori, 1959), p. 1300.

49. Cf. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, English trans. (New York: AMS Press, 1975), and Gaspare Giudice, Pirandello (Turin: UTET, 1963), p. 231. It should be noted that Weininger also outlined the "feminine" passivity of the Jewish anthropological type, and that Debenedetti took u p such a notion and applied it to Svevo (in "Svevo and Schmitz," pp. 82—83). Cf. the well-balanced judgment by Ghidetti, Italo Svevo, pp. 35—36, concluded on p. 40 by a sentence addressed to Sergio Solmi by Svevo: "It is not race but life that makes one a Jew." Cf. also Alberto Cavaglion, Otto Weininger in Italia (Rome: Carucci, 1982). 50. Giovanni Macchia, La caduta della luna (Milan: Mondadori, 1973), pp. 265-66, but the first reference to Sterne is by Pirandello himself in "L'umorismo," p. 130. 51. Caute, The Illusion, p. 182. But he also adds, on p. 211, "Far from proposing that all the world is a stage, dialectical theatre insists that a stage is a stage attempting to say something about the world while remaining conscious of its own nature as a stage. . . . In these respects Pirandello's work is somewhat foreign to dialectical theatre." 52. I realize that the identity cards of these characters are extremely schematic: I have dealt with them more extensively in

146 J Notes to Chapter Three Literary Dueases: Theme and Metaphor in the Italian Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975). 53. In L'opera in versi, pp. 82—83. The definition is Contini's in Una lunga fedelta, p. 25. 54. It is important to note that C. F. Goffis, in concluding his fine reading of "Arsenio," emphasizes how Montale's "strongly intellectual capacity of analyzing the human condition" is wholly resolved in a "musicality" that, by "adhering to the existential moment," has become "an instrument for deepening knowledge," and by pervading the very structure of the composition has become its "soul and language," "Lettura di 'Arsenio' " in Letture montaliane, pp. 69—83, on pp. 76 and 81. 55. To this list one might add "stuoie" (as does Goffis, "Lettura di 'Arsenio,' " p. 74): "Every stanza begins with a hendecasyllable with accents on the second, sixth, tenth syllable and proparoxytone clause (pblvere, seguilo, tremulo, precipita, stuoie)." Besides emphasizing the technical precision of Montale's poetry, this remark is important because it shows the poem's deep musicality: what is dissonance at the lexical level becomes harmony at the metricalrhythmic level. 56. Silvio Ramat likens Arsenio and Zeno as characters, and points out "the influence of the Svevian-Zenoan 'skepticism' . . . at this point of Montale's development" (in Montale, p. 67); Forti refutes this suggestion, and for his part proposes the name of J. Alfred Prufrock: in Le proposte della poesia (Milan: Mursia, 1971), p. 147 n. 16. 57. T h e similarity of the theme of contemplation and action in Svevo and Montale is briefly analyzed by Ettore Bonora, La poesia di Montale, vol. 1, p. 59. Cf. Teresa De Lauretis, La sintassi del desiderio (Ravenna, Longo, 1976), p. 150: Zeno's "sickness is nothing but desire, the abyss open inside the self, the manque a I'etre, the motionless going of Montale's Arsenio"; cf. also Barilli, La linea Svevo-Pirandello, pp. 249—50: "Pirandello's 'exceptional moments' are perfectly homologous with Joyce's epiphanies, Proust's madeleine, and Montale's 'talismans.' " 58. Montale, Sulla poesia, p. 540. 59. Ibid., p. 124. 60. Ibid., p. 649. These words from 1951 seem to recall the "cambiare in inno l'elegia" (to change the elegy into a hymn) of "Riviere" (1920). 61. Cf. Gianni Pozzi, La poesia italiana del Novecento (Turin: Ei-

Notes to Chapter Three | 147 naudi, 1965), p. 167: Arsenio is "the dramatic figure of a char­ acter overwhelmed by his metaphysical incertitude as well as by the storm; he is the precise representation of an individual and at the same time emblematic existence; he is the conscious, al­ though not peaceful, symbol of the existential anguish of an ep­ och, a generation, a human condition." 62. O n this subject see Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baude­ laire," in his Illuminations, with Hannah Arendt's valuable intro­ duction, especially pp. 20-22. 63. It should be noted that Arsenio's solitude might be linked (analogously with Zeno and Moscarda) with a symbolic "absence of the father," at least inasmuch as "Arsenio" is placed in the con­ text of Ossi: in the text of the poem, Arsenio appears "facing the sea," the same Mediterranean called "Padre" (father) in "Mediterraneo," the suite in which Montale describes himself directly, without an alter ego, as "uomo che tarda all'atto" (a man slow to act), and in which he also states: "E questa che in me cresce / e forse la rancura / che ogni figliuolo, mare, ha per il padre" (This, which is growing within me, is perhaps the rancor that each son, ο sea, has for his father) and "dato mi fosse accordare / alle tue voci il mio balbo parlare" (I wish I could harmonize my faltering speech to your voices). Cf. EHo Gioanola, "Mediterraneo IV," in Letture montaliane, pp. 53-68, especially p. 67: " T h e paternal law generates Arsenio," for whom "salvation is not in a naturalistic dissolution, the extreme decadent alibi: it is only in the absolute Other." 64. Montale, "Italo Svevo nel centenario della nascita," in Montale-Svevo, Lettere, p. 169; Debenedetti, in Il romanzo del Novecento, p. 541, speaks of Zeno's "senseless moving which does not make for action." 65. I am using the verb "to resound" as J o h n Hollander would use it in his The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); thus Mon­ tale is justly included, along with William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, and Wallace Stevens, among the modern "echoes" of Shel­ ley; cf. Abrams, " T h e Correspondent Breeze," pp. 44-45. 66. Stefano Jacomuzzi, Sulla poesia di Montale (Bologna: Cappelli, 1968), points out the derivation of Montale's words from Mallarme: "les cendres, atomes des ses ancetres . . . Sur les cendres des astres, celles indivises de Ia famille, c'etait Ie pauvre personnage" (Igitur, IV and V); and he suggested that such a "lit-

148 I Notes to Epilogue erary mediation, with the precise meaning it reveals (the ances­ tors, the dead), signals the accord between the final line and the 'iced multitude of the dead' which seems the end assigned to Arsenio" (pp. 102—3). Also, Marzio Pieri traces the "vita strozzata" (strangled life) back to an essay by Croce on Leopardi, in Biografia della poesia, pp. 186 and 224 n. 125. Such intertextual links as these are, of course, the very basis for a dialogic conception of culture. 67. Bernstein, The Unanswered Question, p. 318. On the preced­ ing page he describes the three types of death Mahler "saw" in his symphony: his own, imminent death ("the opening bars . . . are an imitation of the arrhythmia of his failing heart­ beat"), the death of tonality ("which for him meant the death of music itself"), and the death "of society, of our Faustian culture." In this cultural intertext which seems to multiply under the pen, it is worth recalling that Mahler was the model for that typical antihero in the guise of an artist, Gustav Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. 68. Bonora, La poesia di Montale, p. 148. 69. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 149 and 152. 70. Montale, SuIh poesia, p. 567. On this subject see Piero Bigongiari, "Arsenio piu Simeone ovvero dallOrfismo al correlativo oggettivo" in Letture montaliane, pp. 421—39. 71. Caute, The Illusion, p. 261. 72. Ibid., pp. 261-63. 73. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Ox­ ford University Press, 1967), ρ 98: "And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as en­ demic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution." 74. Bakhtin, "Epic and the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, p. 38.

Epilogue. T h e Plainclothes Clown 1. West, Poet on the Edge, p. 30. Her statement seems indicative of a broad critical consensus. 2. Raimondi, "Prefazione," p. xlix.

Notes to Epilogue | 149 3. Eugenio Montale, Fuori di casa (Milan: Ricciardi, 1969), pp. 48-49. 4. Ibid., p. 49. The choice of the two non-British authors is not by chance: Montale translated Melville's Billy Budd into Italian, and his admiration for Foscolo is well known. I shall simply recall that for Montale, Foscolo belongs to the poetic school that "through the deepening of musical values tries to justify . . . those grey parts, the connecting tissue, the structural-rational cement which are rejected by 'pure' poets—if they are able to" (Sullapoesia, p. 112); and in "Intervista immaginaria" Montale also stated that Foscolo is "a poet who never repeats himself" (ibid., p. 563). 5. Montale, Sulla poesia, p. 570. Cf. also the sequel, important for the notion of dystopia: "The hypothesis of a future society better than the present one is not at all despicable, but it is an economic-political hypothesis which does not warrant inferences in the aesthetic order, unless it becomes a myth." 6. In Claire de C. L. Huffman, "Eugenio Montale: Questions, Answers, and Contexts," Yearbook of Italian Studies, 1973-75, p. 228. 7. Montale, SuUa poesia, pp. 569 and 562. 8. L'opera in versi, p. 278 (from Satura, 1970). 9. Ibid., p. 508 (from Diario del 'yi e del '72). 10. Ibid., p. 1116. 11. Ibid., p. 535. 12. Montale, Quaderno genovese, p. 72. 13. Jean Starobinski, Portrait de Vartiste en saltimbanque, p. 10. All references will be to this edition. 14. P. 131. It is interesting to compare these remarks by Starobinski with analogous ones by Alberto Savinio of 1937: "Superior art is art as a passage to a superior world. It is an art that solves the problem of life, that provides a happy and immutable solution. Luigi Pirandello is one of these proud ferrymen. He is in the company of Picasso, Giorgio De Chirico, and Stravinsky," quoted in Leonardo Sciascia, Cruciverba (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), PP- 174-75· 15. Montale, Sulla poesia, p. 584 (i960). I find an indirect confirmation of my interpretation in Glauco Cambon's reading of "Carnevale di Gerti," the poem contemporary of "Arsenio" but inserted in Le occasioni. Cambon draws an interesting comparison

150 I Notes to Epilogue between the first part of the poem and Otto e mezzo by Federico Fellini (this other contemporary artist, also quoted by Starobinski, for whom the figure of the clown is fundamental): "Characters and symbols from the carnival or circus world finally come to the protagonist's rescue. They bring him back to the magic of childhood"; but "since the last strophic unit negates the spell," the end of the poem resembles I vitelloni, "a movie where the conclusive carnival scene seals hopeless disenchantment" (Eugenio Montale's Poetry, p. 35). These quotations confirm the ambiguity of the poetic voice and of the function of the clown in an extremely clear and independent manner. 16. Barile, in Montale, "Tre articoli ritrovati," p. 19; she also underscores that the young Montale, in reviewing Unamuno, appears to appreciate the latter's "continued leaning over the irrational." 17. Raimondi, "Prefazione," p. xiv. 18. Montale and Svevo, Lettere, p. 110. This sentence, dating back to 1926, was obviously referring to Svevo's Zeno.

Index

Abrams, M. H., 26, 12711, 12811, 14711 "Accordi," 8, 1 5 - 1 8 , 24 A d o r n o , T h e o d o r , 12211, 12511 Agosti, Stefano, 12711 alienation, 7 9 - 8 1 , 82, 86, 87, 93, 103, 105, 106, 108, 1 4 m Almansi, Guido, 138n Alpers, Svetlana and Paul, 13 m , 133n, 137n Altri versi, 60, 84 "Anguilla, L'," 31 anomie, 80-81. See also alienation antiheroism, 15, 56, 70, 72, 76— 79, 82, 86, 9 1 , 105-8, 113, 115, 117 Apollinaire, Guillaume, i22n Arcangeli, Francesco, 45, 46, 47, 54. 57. 63, 68, 84, 109, 134n, 136n, 135n, 137n A r e n d t , Hannah, 73, 74, n g n , 14on,147n A r g a n , Giulio Carlo, 133n, 137n A r n h e i m , Rudolf, 4 1 , 132n, 13gn "Arsenio," 16, 24, 33, 34, 82, 9 6 107, 108, 110, 1 1 5 - 1 7 , 146n, 147n, 149n "Arte povera, L'," 36

Baker, Kenneth, 135n, 137n Bakhtin, Mikhail, 4, 12, 45, 70, 71, 72, 74, 78, 85, n 8 n , i39n, 14111, 148n Baldissone, Giusi, 129n Banti, Anna, 133n Banville, T h e o d o r e de, 14, 19 Barile, Laura, 6, 18, n g n , 12on, 1 2 m , 124n, 125n, 129n, 150n Barilli, Renato, 85, 136n, 144n, 145n, 146n Bastianelli, Giannotto, 6, 12on Bataille, Georges, 13on Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 14, 15, 24, 81, 82, 87, 103, 109, 1 1 7 , 123n, 124n, 126n, 13on, 142n, 143n, 144n Baxandall, Michael, 13 m Bazlen, Bobi, 83 Beckett, Samuel, 83, 144n Beer, Marina, 14on Bellini, Giovanni, 137n Bellow, Saul, 76, 79 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 24, 48, 79, 87, n g n , i26n, 14111, 147n Berger, Peter L., 85, 142n, 144n Bernstein, Leonard, 8, 13, 3g, 105, 12on, 123n, 125n, 148n

151

152 I Index Bertolucci, Attilio, 70 Bettarini, Rosanna, 120η Bigongiari, Piero, 148η Bilenchi, Romano, 44 Blackmur, Richard, 72 Blake, William, 69 Blanchard, Marc-Eli, 41, 132η, 135" Bloomfield, Morton, 31, 33, 65, 67, 129η, 139η Bonfiglioli, Piero, 138η Bonora, Ettore, 129η, 146η, 148η Bonsanti, G., 134η Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, 79, 144η Bortolotto, Mario, 11, 12, 121η, 122η, 123η "Botta e risposta Ι," 111 Boulez, Pierre, 12, 14, 122η, 123η Boutroux, Etienne, 7 Brandi, Cesare, 137 11 Braque, Georges, 20, 45 Brecht, Bertold, 78, 8 t , 83 Brombert, Victor, 72, 140η Browning, Robert, 15, 70, 103, 124η, 128η Bryson, Norman, 135η "Bufera, La," 9, 16 Bufera e altro, La, 31, 84 Bulgheroni, Marisa, 127η Calabrese, Omar, 133 1 1 Calabrese, Stefano, 134 11 Calcaterra, Carlo, 124η Calvesi, Maurizio, 43, 134η, 136η Calvino, Italo, 44, 45, 46, 56, 68, 79, 84, 109, 134η Cambon, Glauco, 61, 128η, 130η, 138η, 149η Camerino, Giuseppe Α., 140η Cammarano, Michele, g Campana, Dino, 43 Camus, Albert, 57» 79 Canetti, Elias, 79

Cardarelli, Vincenzo, 44. !34 1 1 Carducri, Giosue, 43 Caretti, Lanfranco, 125η Carner, Mosco, 121η "Carnevale di Gerti," 149 11 Carra, Carlo, 43, 44. 45. 57. !34« "Casa dei doganieri, La," 104, 129η "Casa sul mare," 28, 129η Casella, Alfredo, 9 Castagnoli, Pier Giovanni, 135η "Cathedrale engloutie, La," 9 Caute, David, 84-85, 107, 142η, 144η,Ι45 η > 148η Cavaglion, Alberto, 145 11 Cavell, Stanley, 124η Cecchi, Emilio, 139". ! 4 4 η "Ce qu'a vu Ie vent de l'Ouest," 16, 26 Celine, Louis Ferdinand, 79 Cezanne, Paul, 14, 20, 52, 54, 57, 76, 119η,137η Chamisso, Adalbert von, 73, 74, 140η Chaplin, Charlie, 20, 74, 75, 87, 103 Chardin, Jean Baptiste Simeon, 46, 137η Chomsky, Noam, 8 Chopin, Frederic, 129η Cima, Annalisa, 126η "Cio che di me sapeste," 23 Claudel, Paul, 122η, 130η, 137η clown, 20, 56, 72, 103, 108—17, 150η Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 27, 124η "Collines d'Anacapri, Les," 18 Contini, Gianfranco, 63, 120η, 133η, 138η, 146η "Contrabasso," 17 Corno, Dario, 126η "Corno inglese," 9, 16, 23, 24-35.

Index | 153 65, 6g, 1oo, 101, 104, 12711, 12811, 12911 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 13711 Costa, Gustavo, 14111 Couperin, Louis, 12311 Cremieux, Benjamin, 83 crepuscolansmo, 17, 20, 143n "Crisalide," 24, 104, 12gn Croce, Benedetto, 7, 12on, 148n cubism, 22, 57 Culler, Jonathan, 148n Curi, Fausto, 126n dandyism, 109—10, 124n D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 9, 10, 11, 17, 43, 6 1 , 82, 84, 106, 1 2 m Dante Alighieri, 88, 128n Debenedetti, Giacomo, 65, 76, 82, 84, 85, 138n, 14on, 1 4 m , 142n, 144n, 145n, 147n Debussy, Claude, 3—7, 9 - 1 6 , 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 34, 35. 38, 43. 69, 105, 110, 1 18n, 12on, 1 2 m , 122n, 123n, 125n, 126n, 129n De Chirico, Giorgio, 43, 45, 57, 134n,149n De Lauretis, Teresa, 146n De Man, Paul, 81, 132n, 142n De Pisis, Filippo, 44 Derrida, Jacques, 39, 88, 127n, 132n, 144n Diaghilev, Sergei P., 19 "Dialogue d u vent et de la mer, Le," 16, 26 Diario del '71 e del '72, 37, 84, 14911 Dickinson, Emily, 26 Diderot, Denis, 13on diminutio antiaulica, 15, 48, 60, 77, 105, 108, 1 1 6 dissonance, 5, 14, 15, 18, 29, 34, 69, 70, 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 , 108, 116, I22n, 125n, 126n, 146n

Doblin, A l f r e d , 79 Dombroski, Robert, 142n Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 74, 76, 77 Duhamel, Georges, 123n Durand, Gilbert, 40, 41, 42, 48, 67, 132n, 136n, 13gn Durkheim, Emile, 80 Einstein, A l f r e d , 122n Eliot, T . S., 45, 84, 91, 102, 106, 143n "En Bateau," 121 n Engels, Friedrich, 14 m "Eroismo, L'," 1 1 2 - 1 3 Etudes, 14 expressionism, 9, 76 "Falsetto " 9, 34, 127n Fautrier, Jean, 45 fauvism, 22 Fellini, Federico, 150n Feneon, Felix, 4, 5, 6, 1 119n Fink, Guido, 14411 Flaubert, Gustave, 113 "Flauti-Fagotti," 17, 18 Focillon, Henri, 136n Fontanesi, Antonio, g fool. See clown Ford, Ford Madox, 78 Forti, Marco, 17, 125n, 126n, 146n Foscolo, Ugo, 110, 149n Fossati, Paolo, 13311 Francastel, Pierre, 4 1 , 132n, 139n Frank, Joseph, 41, 80, 142n Freud, Sigmund, 42, 126n, 138n Friedrich, H u g o , 5, 15, 105, n 8 n futurism, 22, 57 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 7g, 83 Galloway, David, 72, 14on Garber, Frederick, 72 Gasche, Rodolphe, 132n Genette, Gerard, 68, 13gn Gentile, Giovanni, 7 Ghidetti, Enrico, 14on, 145n

154 I Index Giachery, Emerico, 127η Gide, Andre, 144η Gieseking, Walter, 19, 126η Gioanola, Elio, 147η η Giotto, ΐ 3 7 Giraud, Raymond, 72 Giudice, Gaspare, 145η Giudici, Giovanni, 130η Goffis, Cesare Federico, 146η "Golliwog's Cakewalk," 14, 19 Gombrich, E. H., 41, 45, 132η, 135" Govoni, Corrado, 20, 125η, 130η Goya, Francisco, 130η Gozzano, Guido, 10, 140η Grass, Gunther, 79 gratuitous act, go, 93, 144η Guglielmi, Angelo, 143η Guglielmi, Guido, 126η Guiraud, Ernest, 12 Hasek, Jaroslav, 78 Hays, Peter L., 72, 140η Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 77, 80 Heidegger, Martin, 132η Heine, Heinrich, 74, 125η Hekking, Andre, 18 Higonnet, Anne, Margaret, and Patrice, 119η Hollander, John, 147η Homer, 76 Huffman, Claire de C. L., 149η Hughes, Robert, 136η Huxley, Aldous, 107 Images, 8, 14 impressionism, 3-6, 9, 12, 17, 18, 47, 118η, 119η, i2on, 122η, 125η "Infuria sale ο grandine?" 9 " I n limine," 26, 27-28, 34, 104, 127η Ionesco, Eugene, 83, 144η Iser, Wolfgang, 40, 132η

Jacomuzzi, Stefano, 147η Jakobson, Roman, 31, 67, 139η "Jardins sous la pluie," 9, 121η Jarocinski, Stefan, 14, 16, 122η, 123η, 125η, 126η Jarry, Alfred, 113, 122η Jauss, Hans Robert, 45, 134η jester. See clown Joyce, James, 76, 83, 113, 146η Jung, Carl Gustav, 42, 138η Kafka, Franz, 74, 77 Kandinsky, Wassili, 135η Kayser, Wolfgang, 144η Kenner, Hugh, 143η Kermode, Frank, 107, 143η, 148η Kierkegaard, Soren, 7 Klee, Paul, 52 Kubrick, Stanley, 144η Laforgue, Jules, 125η Lamartine, Alphonse de, 24 Langbaum, Robert, 128η, 142η Larbaud, Valery, 83 Laude, Jean, 131η, 133η La Volpe, Luigi, 18 Leopardi, Giacomo, 30, 148η Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 130η liminality, 26, 107, 108, 116 "Limoni, I," 9, 15, 33, 48, 60, 104 Liszt, Franz, 129η "Little Shepherd, The," 14 Lonardi, Gilberto, 143η Longhi, Roberto, 47, 124η, 133η, i34 n - 13511. 13711. 1 4 m Lotman, Juri, 26, 42, 127η, 130η, 133" Lo Vecchio-Musti, Manlio, 140η Louys, Pierre, 14 Lucid, Daniel, 130η Lucini, Gian Pietro, 20 Lukach, Joan M., 135η Lukacs, Georg, 72, 80, 141η Luperini, Romano, 70, 71, 139η, i43n

Index | 155 Luti, Giorgio, 133η Luzi, Mario, 126η Lyotard, Jean Frangois, 38, 39, 40, 42,52, 131η, 132η Macchia, Giovanni, 145η macchiaioh, 9, 121η Macri, Oreste, 128η Maeterlink, Maurice, 15 Magnani, Luigi, 36, 13°° Mahler, Gustav, 105, 148η Mailer, Norman, 78 Mallarme, Stephane, 7, 9, 14, 15, 35, 105, 118η, 147η Malraux, Andre, 93, 130η Mann, Thomas, 148η Manzoni, Alessandro, 82 Marchiori, Giuseppe, 137η Marin, Louis, 38, 39, 46, 131η, 132η, 135η Martelli, Mario, 143η Martyre de Saint Sebastien, Le, 11 Marx, Karl, 80, 86, 141η Masaccio, 137η Mascagni, Pietro, 9 Masques et Bergamasques, 9 Maxia, Sandro, 91, 144η McLuhan, Marshall, 131η "Mediterraneo," 9, 24, 61, 71, 104, 143η, 147η Melville, Herman, 110, 149η "Menestrels," 18. See abo "Min­ strels" Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, 70, 71, 137η, 138η, 139η Mer, La, 9, 16, 26 "Meriggiare pallido e assorto," 30, 59-68, 69 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 52 Merry, Bruce, 138η metaphor-metonymy, 61, 67, 68, 100, 102, 108, 115-16 metaphysical art, 15, 44, 57, 133η, 134"

MiIa, Massimo, 19, 122η, 126η Miller, Henry, 113 Minerbi Treitel, Renata, 86, 144η minstrel. See clown "Minstrels," 3, 7, 9, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21-24, 110, 112, 113, 117 "Minuet," 121η Mitchell, W.J.T., 41, 132η, 142η modernity, 48, 82-83, 85, 105, 109, 113, 117, 124η, 125η, 142η,148η Moloney, Brian, 140η Mondrian, Piet, 57» 1ST^ Monet, Claude, 5, 16, 119η, ΐ2οη, 123η Montale, Eugenio. See titles of in­ dividual poetical works Montale, Marianna, 112 Montanari, Fausto, 134η Morandi, Giorgio, 36, 42-60, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 107, 130η, 133η, 134η, 135η, 136η, 137η, 138η, 141η Moravia, Alberto, 79 Morbelli, Angelo, 6 Morgan, Robert, 122η mountebank. See clown "Mouvements," 8 "Movimenti," 8 Muecke, Douglas C , 142η Muscetta, Carlo, 144η "Musica silenziosa," 8 "Musica sognata," 3, 18. See aho "Minstrels" Musil, Robert, 79, 103 Mussorgsky, Modest P., 7 Namowitz Worthen, Amy, 48, 136η Napoleon Bonaparte, 77, 78 Nascimbeni, Giulio, 118η naturalism, 11 Nietzsche, Friedrich W., 20 Nocturnes, 12

156 | Index " N o n rifugiarti nell'ombra," 23 novelization, 7 1 , 107, 1 1 5 objective correlative, 64, 106 Occasioni, Le, 44, 70, 84, 12911, 14911 O'Faolain, Sean, 72 Opera in versi, L', 84, 12on, 125n, 126n, 127n, 128n, 12gn, 13on, 134n, 137n, 146n, 14gn Orelli, Giorgio, 128n Orwell, George, 107 Ossi di seppia, 3, 7, 8, 18, 23, 26, 37, 45, 46, 5 9 - 6 4 , 7 1 , 8 2 , 8 3 , 84, 96, 104, 1 1 7 , 12on, 129n, 135n, 1 3 7 n . 1 3 9 " , 143 n - 1 4 7 n Palazzeschi, A l d o , 20, 125n, 126n Pampaloni, Geno, 144n Papini, Giovanni, 43 Parker, Harley, 13 m Pascoli, Giovanni, 1 2 1 n Pater, Walter, 13on Patrizi, Giorgio, 1 3 m Peckham, Morse, 80, 1 4 m Pelleas et MMisande, 12, I23n Pellizza da Volpedo, Giuseppe, 6 Perella, Nicolas J., 66, 138n "Per finire," 1 1 1 Petrarch, 6 1 , 84, 128n Philippe de Champagne, 38 Pica, Vittorio, 3, 5, 6, 118n, n g n Picasso, Pablo, 20, 45, 93, 113, 14gn Pieri, Marzio, 9, 12on, 148n Pieri, Piero, 126n Piero delta Francesca, 57, 137n Pipa, Arshi, 138n Pirandello, Luigi, 20, 72, 73, 76, 82, 83, 84, 85, 92-96, 106, 14on, 143n, 145n, 146n, 149n Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 6 poetry: and music, 3—11; and painting, 36—46; and prose, 69—

86

Poggioli, Renato, 1 4 m Pollock, Jackson, 134n Popper, Karl, 41 Pound, Ezra, 103, 128n Poussin, Nicolas, 39 Pozza, Neri, 13on Pozzi, Gianni, 146n Praz, Mario, 72 Prelude a I'apres midi d'un faune,

12,

13 Preludes, 14, 18 pre-Raphaelites, 9 Previati, Gaetano, 6 Previtali, Giovanni, 1 3 m Proust, Marcel, 68, 70, 83, 13on, 146n Puccini, Giacomo, 9, 10, 121n, 14on Quaderno dt quattro anni, 60, 84 Rabelais, Francois, 74 Ragusa, Olga, 118n Raimondi, Ezio, 81, 108, 109, 117, 12on, 124n, 142n, 144n, 148n, 15on Raimondi, Giuseppe, 57, 134n Ramat, Silvio, 17, 12on, 125n, 126n, 12gn, 146n Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 123n Rank, Otto, 145n Rattalino, Piero, 123n, 126n, 12gn Ravel, Maurice, 16 Reed, Walter, 1 4 m Rembrandt, H. van Rijn, 57, 136n,137n Renoir, Auguste, 12on, 123n, 137n Rewald, John, n g n Rilke, Rainer Maria, 112, 114, 116 Rimbaud, Jean Arthur, 9, 124n "Riviere," 61, 146n Riviere, Jacques, 13, 123n rogue. See clown Rollin, R. B., 14on

Index | 157 romanticism, g, 13, 27, 7g-8o, 81, 104 Rosiello, Luigi, 127n Rouault, Georges, 1 1 3 Rousseau, Henri, i 2 2 n Ruskin, John, 13on Ruwet, Nicholas, 1 2 m , 123n Saba, Umberto, 84 Salinger, J. D., 7g Salvetti, Guido, 11, 1 2 m , 122n, 123n Sanguineti, Edoardo, 17, 125n Sapegno, Natalino, 144n Sartre, Jean Paul, 7g, g3 Satie, Eric, 122n Satura, 84, 13on, 14gn Savinio, Alberto, 149n scaptgliati, g Scestov, Lev, 7 Schapiro, Meyer, 132n Schefer, Jean Louis, 1 3 m Schilling, Bernard, 72 schlemihl, 74, 75, g3, 1 1 7 Schmitz, Ettore, 75. See also Svevo, Italo Schonberg, Arnold, 7, 20, 125n Sciascia, Leonardo, 14gn Scrivano, Riccardo, 133a, 140n Sebeok, T h o m a s , 13gn Segantini, Giovanni, 6 Segers, Rien T., 134n Segre, Cesare, 126n, 13111, 133n, l39n

Solmi, Sergio, 125n, 134n, 135n, 145n Soutine, Chai'm, 45 Starobinski, Jean, 20, 1 1 3 - 1 5 , 126n, 149n, 150n Steiner, George, 14 m Steiner, Wendy, 132n Sterne, Lawrence, 73, 145n Stevens, Wallace, 52, 136n, 147n stoicism, 44, 60, 84, 104, 108, l o g , 117 Strada, Vittorio, 134n Stravinsky, Igor, 15, 20, 2g, 125n, 14gn "Suonatina di pianoforte," 8, 16, 125n Svevo, Italo, 20, 70, 75, 77, 82-92, 106, 14on, 1 4 m , 142n, 143n, 144n, 145n, 146n, 147n, 150n symbolism, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 118n, 119n, 122n, 124n syntactic ambiguity, 33, 65

Tate, Allen, 147n Thomas, Dylan, 76 Titian, 137 Tobey, Mark, 45 Torrance, Robert, 72, 14on Tozzi, Federigo, 76, 144n Trilling, Lionel, 73, 77, 1 4 m Turner, J.W.M., 16, 125n, 134n Turner, Victor, 127n Tynianov, Juri, 70

Serra, Renato, 6, 12on Seurat, Georges, 5 Severini, Gino, 20 Shattuck, Roger, 1 2 1 n

Uccello, Paolo, 137n Unamuno, Miguel de, 150n Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 14, 84, 124n, 134n Uspensky, Boris, 127n, 13on

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 27, 31, 104, 105, 128n, 129n, 147n Siciliano, Enzo, 12 i n Simmel, Georg, 80, 14111, 142n Singleton, Charles, 142n Soffici, A r d e n g o , 5, 20, 46, n g n

Valentini, Alvaro, 138n Valery, Paul, 86, 13on, 143n Van Gennep, Arnold, 127n Van Gogh, Vincent, 132n "Vent sur la plaine, Le," 26 Verga, Giovanni, 82

158 I Index verismo, 10 Verlaine, Paul, 10, 14, 19 Vermeer, Jan, 57, 137η Vidrac, Charles, 123η "Violini," 18 "Violoncelli," 17, 18 Vitale da Bologna, 54 Vitali, Lamberto, 47, 48, 136η, 137η Wagner, Richard, 10, 11, ia, 13, 14, 122η, 123η Watteau, Antoine, 19 Weininger, Otto, 95, 145η Wenk, Arthur, 14, 123η, 125η

West, Rebecca, 108, 127η, 139η, 148η White, L. Α., 85 Widdowson, H. G., 39 Williams, Raymond, 141η Williams, William Carlos, 147η wind, 16, 25-35, 96-107, 127η Winn, James Anderson, 120η Woolf, Virginia, 36, 131η Wordsworth, William, 27, 128η Worringer, Wilhelm, 80, 142η Yeats, William Butler, 130η Zamyatin, Tevgeny, 107 Zeri, Federico, 131η

Princeton Essays on the Arts

Guy Sirceilo, A New Theory of Beauty (1975) Rab Hatfield, Botticelli's Uffiu "Adoration": A Study in Pictorial Content (1976) Rensselaer W. Lee, Names on Trees: Ariosto Into Art (1976) Alfred Brendel, Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts (1977) Robert Fagles, I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh (1978) Jonathan Brown, Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (1978) Walter Cahn, Masterpieces: Chapters on the History of an Idea (1979) Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (1980) Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (1980) James H. Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon (1981) Mary Ann Caws, The Eye in the Test: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (1981) Morris Eaves, William Blake's Theory of Art (1982) E. Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt: The Nightwatch (1982) John V. Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan ExegesL· (1982) Peter Kivy, Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (1984) John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (1989) Gian-Paolo Biasin, Montale, Debussy, and Modernism (1989)